Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below give some simple and important suggestions for all of us to keep in mind when giving a class lecture. It is by Professor Rolf E. Hummel at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and is now required reading for all new professors at the University of Florida. The article first appeared in the University of Florida, “Pedagogator,” Vol. 3, Issue 13, July/Aug 2005. Reprinted with permission. Further suggestions for effective teaching can be found at the Pedagogator website: http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/newsletters/pedagogator.shtml

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Is There a Global Warming Toward Women in Academia?

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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CONTEMPLATIONS AFTER FORTY YEARS OF TEACHING

By Professor Rolf E. Hummel
University of Florida – College of Engineering (Dept. of Material Science & Engineering)

The other day I ran into my good old friend David Bloomquist. He told me during our curb-side chat that is now the director of the “University Center for Excellence in Teaching”. Eventually, after having shown me his spacious office, he handed me a coffee mug and an executive ballpoint pen, both with the insignia of the Center. Then, after having “bribed” me this way, Dave asked me to please write a contribution for his newsletter “The Pedagogator” because he knew that I had been graced so far with 12 teaching awards (among them the university-wide teacher of the year, the Florida Blue Key teaching award, several college of engineering awards, and the TIP award-twice). Dave felt that I surely had a few words to say about my past experiences that would be of help to new professors. Further, he suggested that I could possibly comment on some of the new teaching methods that are currently discussed and occasionally even implemented. I am glad to comply with his request even though I have to admit that I practice no spectacular new techniques. But my students like what I have been doing as expressed in numerous enthusiastic teacher evaluations. What I do is simply the following:

1) I prepare at least one hour per period for classes which I have given before and about 5-7 hours for each new class. This preparation allows me to teach without reading from or referring to notes.

2) I arrive in the classroom at the right time, or even a few minutes earlier to have the chance to chat with my students or answer any questions they may have.

3) I start my class with a one or two minute review of the previous lecture.

4) I am a great supporter of the old fashioned blackboard. The larger it is, the better. I write as much as possible on this board, and highlight important parts with colored chalk and/or put a box around important equations. (I do not like so much the new whiteboards because one has to always remember to cap the markers before they dry out. And those markers available in the lecture room often do not work anyway, so you have to bring your own.

5) I start at the upper, left-hand corner of the blackboard. I do not erase anything during the entire hour. At the end of the lecture I have reached the lower, right-hand corner of the blackboard. Admittedly, this takes some advanced planning and practice, but can be eventually accomplished by everybody.

6) I attempt to write large and legibly enough so that my “hieroglyphics” can be read from the last row. After class I often walk to the back of the lecture room to see if I succeeded in doing so.

7) During the last three minutes of the lecture I repeat briefly what was discussed that day by showing with a pointer the relevant graphs or equations on the board and mention how they were arrived at. This lets the students see the larger context in which the individual steps have been developed.
I attempt not to block the blackboard with my body so that virtually everybody can see what is written on the board; at least most of the time. This is accomplished by stepping aside after writing.

9) When drawing a graph on the board, I carefully label the axes by saying what they represent and describe a curve while drawing it. If there is more than one curve in a given graph, I distinguish them with different colors and write on each curve what parameters they represent.

10) To each class I bring a bunch of “show-and-tell” items, such as a transformer, a computer chip, a computer hard drive, a laser tube, a silicon crystal, several magnets, a transistor, a shape memory alloy etc., so that students have hands-on experience of the subjects I am talking about. Occasionally, I show movies that depict manufacturing processes of what was explained before in theory.

11) I encourage questions during class and answer them in a respectful manner (even the supposedly ’stupid questions’). If I do not know the answer immediately, I admit so (which makes a student feel good) and promise to answer it next time.

12) I feel that overloading the students with information during class does not serve them properly. Often less information, but that in more depth, is pedagogically better. After all, the students can learn supplemental information from their textbooks.

13) I am a supporter of the Monday/Wednesday/Friday rhythm rather than the two or three hour-long lecture on one day. Students need digestion between lectures and catching up with their homework.

14) I try to speak loud and distinctly so that everybody should be able to hear and understand me. I aim my voice toward the last student row. Foreign students particularly appreciate this.

15) I address my students by looking at them during the lecture, that is, I keep eye contact. This way I can see if some students drift away, requiring me to change the pace.

16) I take a class picture during one of the first lectures and ask the students to write their names next to their image. This gives me the chance to memorize their names and to address them with their names during lectures and in my office. (I admit memorizing names becomes increasingly difficult with age).

17) Student like my “war stories,” that is, practical examples in which the subjects just taught have been used (or not been used with negative consequences). This loosens up the flow of information and demonstrates the relevance of the often theoretical-appearing subjects. In other words, a proper balance between theory and practical aspects needs to be maintained.

18) I am not a friend of projected transparencies because they are frequently removed before the students are capable of fully comprehending what they want to teach. Still, occasionally even I use overhead projectors when putting the respective information on the board would require too much time or when the students have the same graph in their textbook and I need to point out certain details on the image. Flashing slides in five second intervals on a screen turns students quickly away from paying attention. In other words, each transparency needs to stay on the screen long enough so that all details they contain can be fully explained and understood. On the same line, I am not a friend of PowerPoint presentations in the classroom. They have their merit in seminars and conferences where a substantial amount of information needs to be transmitted in a relatively short time.

19) Before an exam, I hand out tests from previous years, whose answers we discuss in the class immediately before the upcoming midterm or final.

20) I allow my students to prepare for the test a one-page, hand-written, personal “crib sheet” on which they may write all the equations and graphs they consider to be important. They have to turn-in this sheet along with their tests. This promotes academic honesty and gives those students some confidence who otherwise “draw a complete blank” during tests. Interestingly enough, most students admit that once they have written a crib sheet they don’t need it any more during the test since they are now well prepared for the exam and they feel confident that they can turn to their sheet when need arises. Needless to say, my tests do not allow mere regurgitation of crammed information, but usually require some thinking. For this reason, my exams are often labeled as “difficult,” (”because asking a student to think is unfair”).

21) Most of all, however, I consider my students to be my friends. I am kind to them and am available most of the time for questions and for airing concerns. My door is virtually always open. I teach all classes myself, I write the tests and grade them myself and use teaching assistants only for looking over the homework, which I assign, (because one can only learn by “doing” and not so much by just listening). As a former student once wrote in retrospect: “Dr. Hummel does not only teach class, he adopts it.”

In summary, I love teaching and showing my enthusiasm about the subject matter. This spark flies over to my students and makes them enthusiastic too.

These points may sound, for some readers, old-fashioned. So be it. But why should we abandon techniques that have been proven to be successful over many decades? I feel that we should use whatever produces the best educational results. For some instructors, the impersonal PowerPoint presentation, etc., works. For others it is the personally addressed, spoken word that reaches the minds and souls of the students.

Most importantly however: It is often said that classroom teaching at university does not help a professor in obtaining tenure and promotion. What really counts is research money and publications. Those colleagues and administrators who think like this should keep in mind that the future of or nation depends strongly on what and how we are educating the younger generation.

Having this in mind, I strongly feel that proper, compassionate and enthusiastic teaching (in the classroom and the research lab) is the most important mission of a university.

Folks:

The posting below looks at ways of measuring learning gains of students exposed to the new approaches of “interactive engagement.” It is by Richard Hake, Indiana University, Emeritus and is number 31 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 15, Number 1, © Copyright 1996-2005. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Contemplations after 40 years of teaching

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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A POSSIBLE MODEL FOR HIGHER EDUCATION: THE PHYSICS REFORM EFFORT

What to Measure And How to Measure

Investigation of the extent to which a paradigm shift from teaching to learning is taking place requires measurement of students’ learning in college classrooms. But Wilbert McKeachie 1987 has pointed out that the time-honored gauge of student learning-course exams and final grades-typically measures lower-level educational objectives such as memory of facts and definitions rather than higher-level outcomes such as critical thinking and problem solving. (For more general characterizations of higher-order learning see Anderson & Krathwohl 2001 and Shavelson & Huang 2003.) The same criticism (Hake 2002a) as to assessing only lower-level learning applies to Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET’s), since their primary justification as measures of student learning appears to lie in the modest correlation with overall ratings of course (+ 0.47) and instructor (+ 0.43) with “achievement” as measured by course exams or final grades (Cohen 1981). For general characterizations of higher-order learning see Anderson & Krathwohl 2001 and Shavelson & Huang 2003. In their “Chart 1,” the latter display higher-level learning such as “procedural” (see, e.g., Anderson 2004), “schematic,” and “strategic” knowledge within knowledge domains, as might be measured and enhanced by disciplinary experts.

How then can we measure students’ higher-level learning in college courses? Several indirect (and therefore in my view problematic) gauges have been developed; e.g., Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), National Survey Of Student Engagement (NSSE), Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG), and Knowledge Surveys (KS’s) (Nuhfer & Knipp 2003).

On the other hand, Richard Hersh 2005 has discussed two types of direct measures developed by the Learning Assessment Project (of which he is co-director) that “evaluate students’ ability to articulate complex ideas, examine claims and evidence, support ideas with relevant reasons and examples, sustain a coherent discussion, and use standard written English.” But Shavelson & Huang 2003 warn that “learning and knowledge are highly domain-specific-as, indeed, is most reasoning. Consequently, the direct impact of college is most likely to be seen at the lower levels of Chart 1 – domain-specific knowledge and reasoning. Yet, in the formulation of most college goal statements for learning-and consequently in choices about the kinds of tests to be used on a large scale to hold higher education accountable-the focus is usually in large part on the upper regions of Chart 1″ (those emphasized by the Learning Assessment Project & Knipp 2003; my italics). (For a discussion and references for all but the last see Hake, 2005.)

Pre/Post Testing

In sharp contrast to the invalid or indirect measures discussed in the above two paragraphs is the direct measure of students’ higher-level domain-specific learning through pre/post testing using (a) valid and consistently reliable tests devised by disciplinary experts, and (b) traditional courses as controls. Such pre/post testing, pioneered by economists (Paden & Moyer 1969) and physicists (Halloun & Hestenes 1985a,b), is rarely employed in higher education, in part because of the tired old canonical objections recently lodged by Suskie 2004 and countered by Hake 2004a and Scriven 2004. Despite the nay-sayers, pre/post testing is gradually gaining a foothold in introductory astronomy, economics, biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, and physics courses (see Hake 2004b for references). It should be emphasized that such low-stakes formative pre/post testing is the polar opposite of the high-stakes summative testing mandated by the U.S. Department of Education’s No Child Left Behind act for K-12 (USDE 2005a) that is now contemplated for higher education (USDE 2005b). As the NCLB experience shows, such testing often falls victim to “Campbell’s Law” (Campbell 1975, Nichols & Berliner 2005): “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

What Physics Has Learned

Physics education researchers (PER’s) have employed formative pre/post testing to show that traditional (T) introductory physics courses promote very little change in students’ understanding of basic physics concepts; regardless of the experience, enthusiasm, talents, and motivation of their professors. This has driven some physicists to develop novel “interactive engagement” (IE) methods, among them: Microcomputer-based Labs, Concept Tests, Modeling, Active Learning Problem Sets, Overview Case Studies, and Socratic Dialogue Inducing Labs (for references see Hake 2002b). That such Interactive Engagement methods are relatively effective in promoting student higher-level learning has been demonstrated by the nearly two-standard deviation (cf. Bloom’s 1984 “two sigma problem”) superiority in normalized average learning gains of IE courses over T (traditional) courses (Hake 1998a,b, 2002b,c and corroborative references therein). Notable examples are large enrollment courses at Harvard (Crouch & Mazur 2001), North Carolina State University (Beichner & Saul 2004), MIT (Dori & Belcher 2004), the University of Colorado at Boulder (Pollock 2005), and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo (Hoellwarth, et al. 2005).

Some definitions are in order. In the above paragraph (a) the average normalized gain is the actual gain [<%post> - <%pre>] divided by the maximum possible gain [100% - <%pre>], where the angle brackets indicate the class averages; (b) T courses are operationally defined courses as those reported by instructors to make little or no use of IE methods, relying primarily on passive-student lectures, recipe labs, and algorithmic problem exams; (c) IE courses are operationally defined as those designed at least in part to promote conceptual understanding through interactive engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors.

For links to over 50 U.S. PER groups, over 200 PER papers published in the American Journal of Physics since 1972, and tests of cognitive and affective conditions see, respectively, Meltzer 2005a, Meltzer 2005b, and NCSU 2005. The very active PER discussion list PhysLrnR logged over 750 posts in 2005. As far as I know, no other discipline is so actively researching undergraduate student learning. For reviews see McDermott & Redish 1999, Redish 1999, Thacker 2003, Heron & Meltzer 2005, and Wieman & Perkins 2005.

The March of Synapses

The fact that IE methods are far more effective in promoting conceptual understanding than traditional passive-student methods is probably related to the “enhanced synapse addition and modification” induced by those methods. Bransford, et al. 2000 wrote: “. . . synapse addition and modification are lifelong processes, driven by experience. In essence, the quality of information to which one is exposed and the amount of information one acquires is reflected throughout life in the structure of the brain. This process is probably not the only way that information is stored in the brain, but it is a very important way that provides insight into how people learn.” Leamnson 1999, 2000 has also stressed the relationship of biological brain change to student learning. In his Chapter 5 “Teaching and Pedagogy,” Leamnson 1999 wrote, “Teaching must involve telling, but learning will only start when something persuades students to engage their minds and do what it takes to learn.” Another reminder that the affective and the cognitive are inextricably linked, as recently emphasized by Ed Nuhfer 2005 in this Forum.

The Challenge

I see no reason that student learning gains far larger than those in traditional courses could not eventually be achieved and documented in other disciplines from arts through philosophy to zoology if their practitioners would (a) reach a consensus on the crucial concepts that all beginning students should be brought to understand, (b) undertake the lengthy qualitative and quantitative research required to develop multiple-choice tests (MCT’s) of higher-level learning of those concepts, so as to (c) gauge the need for and effects of non-traditional pedagogy, and (b) develop Interactive Engagement methods suitable to their disciplines.

Why MCT’s? So that the tests can be given to thousands of students in hundreds of courses under varying conditions in such a manner that meta-analyses can be performed, thus establishing general causal relationships in a convincing manner.

But can multiple-choice tests measure higher-order learning? Wilson & Bertenthal 2005 think so, writing: “Performance assessment is an approach that offers great potential for assessing complex thinking and learning abilities, but multiple choice items also have their strengths. For example, although many people recognize that multiple-choice items are an efficient and effective way of determining how well students have acquired basic content knowledge, many do not recognize that they can also be used to measure complex cognitive processes. For example, the Force Concept Inventory [Hestenes et al. 1992] . . . is an assessment that uses multiple-choice items to tap into higher-level cognitive processes.”

Lessons Learned

Can nearly all university disciplines develop synapse-stimulating interactive engagement methods, and also valid and reliable multiple-choice tests of affective and cognitive conditions to measure their effectiveness? I would bet “Yes,” provided they care enough about student learning to mount the necessary research and development effort.
Aside from the advantages of pre/post testing, perhaps physics education researchers’ most important lessons (Hake 2002b) for higher education are Lessons #1, 3, and 4:

L1: The use of Interactive Engagement strategies can increase the effectiveness of conceptually difficult courses well beyond that obtained with traditional methods.

L3: High-quality standardized tests of the cognitive and affective impact of courses are essential for gauging the relative effectiveness of non-traditional and traditional educational methods. For examples of such physics tests see the listing at http://www.ncsu.edu/per/TestInfo.html NCSU 2005.

L4: Education Research and Development by disciplinary experts (DEs), and of the same quality and nature as traditional science/engineering R&D, is needed to develop potentially effective educational methods within each discipline. But the DEs should take advantage of the insights of DEs engaged in education R&D in other disciplines, cognitive scientists, faculty and graduates of education schools, and classroom teachers.

Calls for the accountability of higher education in promoting student learning are becoming more forceful, both from inside the university, e.g., Duderstadt 2000, Hersh 2005, Hersh & Merrow 2005, Bok 2005a,b; and outside the university, e.g., by the U.S. Dept. of Education’s new “Commission on the Future of Higher Education” (USDE 2005b). For reports on the Commission’s first two meetings and commissioner’s comments on the possibility of NCLB-like testing in higher education, and on the declining literacy of college graduates (NAAL 2005), see Lederman 2005a,b.

As Hersh 2005 observes: “. . . in an era when the importance of a college diploma is increasing while public support for universities is diminishing, [assessment of student learning] is desperately needed. The real question is who will control it. Legislators are prepared to force the issue: Congress raised the question of quality during its recent hearings on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act; all regional accrediting agencies and more than forty states now require evidence of student learning from their colleges and universities; and pressure is rising to extend a No Child Left Behind-style testing regime to higher education” (see USDE 2005a,b).

Thus it would appear to be high time for faculty members to turn more of their attention to shifting the higher education paradigm from teaching to learning, both because it’s the right thing to do, and because not doing so may invite stifling oversight by state and national bureaucrats.

(Professor Hake’s extensive list of references may be found posted in the ancillary materials section for this issue of the FORUM on www.ntlf.com.)

Contact:
Richard Hake
Emeritus Professor of Physics
Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street
Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Email: rrhake@earthlink.net
Web: http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi

Folks:

The article below looks at the need for, and the importance of, integrative learning.. It is by Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs, Association of American Colleges and Universities. The article is from the Summer/Fall, 2005 issue of Peer Review, 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.edy
UP NEXT: The Physics Education Reform Effort: A Possible Model for Higher Education?

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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WHY INTEGRATIVE LEARNING? WHY NOW?

The impulse to connect is a universal human desire and a critical component of intellectual and emotional maturity, and probably always has been. The challenges of the contemporary world, however, have brought a new urgency to the issue of connection and integration. An early cartoon in the always-insightful Dilbert series captures well one of the defining features of our time. In the cartoon, a character uses a teacup on its side to represent the human brain. An enormous fire hose sprays water in the direction of the cup to illustrate the information overload that characterizes so much of modern life. As one might expect, nothing stays inside the cup, while water sprays everywhere on the page. Today’s college student needs more than ever a developed capacity to make sense of this flood of information flowing into his or her consciousness every day. That capacity depends fundamentally on how well she or he can see connections and integrate disparate facts, theories, and contexts to make sense of our complex world. For these reasons, in its new campaign, Liberal Education and America’s Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is highlighting integrative ability as a key outcome of a quality undergraduate education today.

It is clear that integrative learning is essential to prepare students to deal effectively both with complex issues in their working lives and the challenges facing the broader society today and in the future. As the articles in this issue make clear, after years of compartmentalizing knowledge, leaders across the educational spectrum are renewing efforts to connect fragmented learning. In fact, it could be argued that in most arenas outside the academy–from the workplace to scientific discovery to medicine to world and national affairs–multilayered, unscripted problems routinely require an integrative approach.

For these reasons, AAC&U suggested in its 2002 report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, that schools, colleges, and universities should enable students to become “integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions.” These thinkers must learn to “adapt the skills learned in one situation to problems encountered in another: in a classroom, the workplace, their communities, or their personal lives” (21).

The Greater Expectations report, of course, was not the first to call for this kind of learning. Integration has become an ongoing topic of discussion among federal and state policy makers, campus and K-12 leaders, business leaders, and members of professional societies. The U.S. Department of Education’s Goals 2000 project endorsed “interdisciplinary frameworks” and thematic teaching of “big ideas” (1998). The 1991 report Science for All Americans (Rutherford and Ahlgren) is critical of teaching scientific principles in isolation and calls for thematic approaches and for approaches that teach students to apply academic concepts to real-world contexts. The American Association for the Advancement of Science also supports integrative learning and the application of scientific concepts to real-world situations through Project 2061.

Integration of knowledge and multidisciplinary perspectives are among the top priorities endorsed by the professions as well. In its report Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology argues for advancing integrative learning, including the capacity to work in multidisciplinary teams, as a target goal for future engineering professionals. The International Association for Management Education predicts interdisciplinary activity will reach a new level of sophistication as more problem-oriented courses and multidisciplinary units are developed in undergraduate and graduate business programs.

Leaders in the K-12 standards movements also advocate integrative learning. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics includes “connections” as one of its standards, suggesting that “instructional programs . . . should enable all students to . . . understand how mathematical ideas interconnect and build on one another to produce a coherent whole; [and] recognize and apply mathematics” in contexts outside of the field (2002, 64-65). These sorts of standards are echoed in other subject areas.

The business community, too, is calling for integrative capacities in employees. As early as 1991, the U.S. Department of Labor SCANS Report (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) argued that “workers are expected to identify, and integrate information from diverse sources” and that they “should understand their own work in context of work of those around them . . . [and] understand how parts of systems are connected” (22). The Business-Higher Education Forum’s report Spanning the Chasm argues that “requiring interdisciplinary courses and projects will benefit students by helping them integrate skills and by presenting them with a broader range of perspectives” (1999, 8).

Finally, the calls for integrative learning are supported by cognitive research. The National Academy of Science report How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School suggests that

[in] traditional curricula . . . though an individual objective might be reasonable, it is not seen as part of a larger network.

Yet it is the network, the connections among objectives, that is important. . . . to understand an overall picture that will ensure the development of integrated knowledge. (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, eds. 2000, 139)

Given the interest from many sectors and the exciting developments in integrative and interdisciplinary scholarship that are transforming so many fields of study, support for integrative learning appears to be quite strong. The challenge remains, however, to turn promising integrative learning innovations into coherent programs of study with progressively more rigorous expectations for all today’s undergraduate students.

References

Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. 2000. Criteria for accrediting engineering programs. Baltimore:
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2002. Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Bransford, J. D., A. L. Brown, and R. R. Cocking, eds. 2000. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Business-Higher Education Forum. 1999. Spanning the chasm: A blueprint for action. Washington, DC: American Council of Education/National Alliance of Business.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 2002. Principles and standards of school mathematics. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. standards.nctm.org/document/chapter3/conn.htm.

Rutherford, F. J., and A. Ahlgren. 1991. Science for all Americans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. 1991. What work requires of schools: A SCANS report for America 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

U.S. Department of Education. 1998. Goals 2000: Reform education to improve student achievement. 1998. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. www.ed.gov/PDFDocs/gzkfinal.pdf.

Folks:

The posting below looks at how to help faculty deal with fears about making changes in their teaching. It is from Chapter 9, Preparing Faculty for Pedagogical Change: Helping Faculty Deal With Fear, by Linda C. Hodges, Princeton University, in To Improve the Academy, Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development, Volume 24, Sandra Chadwick-Blossey, Editor. ISBN 1-882982-89-4. Copyright © 2006 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. 563 Main Street, P.O. Box 249 Bolton, MA 01740-0249 USA. www.ankerpub.com

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Why Integrative Learning? Why Now?

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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PREPARING FACULTY FOR PEDAGOGICAL CHANGE: HELPING FACULTY DEAL WITH FEAR

How receptive faculty are to changing their pedagogical approach is a complex issue, but one factor that impedes change is the fear of taking a risk. Underlying this fear may be the fear of loss, fear of embarrassment, or fear of failure. Addressing these issues can empower faculty to be more innovative in their teaching. Drawing on research literature, personal teaching narratives, and my own work in faculty development, I discuss some of these underlying fears. I then offer concrete strategies for working with faculty to enable them to overcome these emotional barriers and embrace change.

Introduction

One way to ensure a lively, even heated, debate among college and university faculty is to turn the conversation to the newest pedagogical strategies. Teaching approaches such as collaborative learning and problem-based learning have been extolled by some as ways to develop students’ critical thinking and problem-solving abilities and to increase students’ engagement in their learning. But these techniques have also been seen by some as trendy, resulting in little more than an increase in the students’ “feeling good” factor and a decrease in content covered and knowledge retained by students. These concerns may be countered by those who adopt the constructivist’s view that knowledge cannot be transferred intact from lecturer to listener but must be actively created in part through interactions with others. Other educators point out challenges in some of these student-centered approaches, however, such as the danger of misconceptions promoted by group work and the difficulties in transferring content learned in highly contextualized formats such as problem-based learning. Often the difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of various teaching methods punctuates these discussions.

If we start probing in these conversations, we may find that skepticism is expressed not only about those strategies that my be considered most nontraditional, such as problem-based learning, but also for more conventional teaching formats such as class discussions or student-led problem sessions. And, conversely, proponents of highly interactive formats may devalue any form of lecturing. How receptive faculty are to the perceived value of pedagogical strategies is a complex issue that depends less on hoe compelling the data are in support of these approaches and more on what teachers believe about teaching. Teachers’ beliefs in an important topic in educational research, as are studies on how these beliefs may affect practice (Hativa & Goodyear, 2002). These beliefs need not be static but evolve over a teacher’s career depending on experiences and the ability of the teacher to reflect on those experiences. Even then, the impetus to change one’s teaching practices based on experience and reflection is affected by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. For example, an intrinsic motivation may be how much teaching generates a personal sense of satisfaction and an extrinsic motivation may be how teaching is rewarded in our professional career.

Although certain critical impediments to faculty undertaking new pedagogical approaches are institutional and thus extrinsic, those that are most readily addressed are personal. A prerequisite step to the willingness to teach differently is the reflection on practice. Yet reflective teachers may not change the approach they take in the classroom, even though they themselves perceive a need for change based on student feedback, student performance, or their own sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. As we work with these faculty to improve their teaching, we may face resistance that is hard to decipher. We cannot begin to uncover the range of experiences that faculty have that shape their beliefs about teaching, nor to understand each teacher’s psychological, philosophical, and emotional underpinnings for their practice. Yet one factor that has been shown to stand in the way of teachers changing their practice is the fear of taking a risk (McAlpine &Weston, 2002). Addressing this fear can help faculty become more receptive to introducing innovation and flexibility in their teaching. In this chapter I outline some possible reasons for this fear, and I offer suggestions that can help them push past this emotional barrier.

Underlying Fears

Several eloquent personal narratives of teaching exist that highlight a professor’s fears and how they have shaped life and career. Elaine Showalter (2003) in her memoir-handbook, Teaching Literature, devotes an entire chapter to teaching anxiety and categorizes it into seven types depending on its source: lack of training, feelings of isolation, tension between teaching and research, coverage demands, performance issues, grading challenges, and student and peer evaluations. She highlights fears involved in teaching literature, pointing out that “we believe that what we say in the classroom reveals the deepest aspects of ourselves” (p.3). This fear of exposure may take many forms and may be more acute in the classroom than in other public arenas because instructors face this audience day after day. Perceptions of mistakes, inadequacies, even character flaws, reenter the classroom daily with one’s students, to be compounded by each new infraction.

In his insightful and moving account, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) echoes what research and our own experiences tell us:

In unguarded moments with close friends, we who teach will acknowledge a variety of fears: having our work unappreciated, being inadequately rewarded, discovering one fine morning that we chose the wrong profession, spending our lives on trivia, ending up feeling like frauds. But many of us have another fear that we rarely name: out fear of the judgment of the young. (pp. 47- 48)

Palmer notes how these fears can lead eventually to stagnation and cynicism if faculty fail to interpret their experiences accurately or, we might say, fail to reflect productively on those experiences.

Unlike Palmer and Showalter and a few other narrators, to many faculty fear is indeed a four-letter word, one not to be spoken in polite society. As faculty talk to us about their teaching, it is up to us to recognize the various fears that underlie apparent resistance, frustration, or complacency. We may then respond more effectively with strategies that allow them to push past their fears and give them new hope to re-reinvigorate their teaching.

Fears of Loss

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for applying insights from psychological research to economic science. Specifically, he and his colleagues studied how human judgment affects decision-making under uncertainty or risk. This work was based on an area of cognitive science that deals with the concept of cognitive bias. Cognitive bias arises when we are faced with complex problems that have no simple solution and our intuitive thinking resorts to heuristics (i.e., general guidelines) to tackle the issue quickly. Unfortunately, in some cases these simple procedures produce erroneous conclusions, especially when our decision depends on a good understanding of the probability of certain events. Kahneman and Tversky (1979) found that people would pass up the possibility of great financial gains in order to avoid a loss-the idea of loss aversion. When making a decision that involves risk, many of us do not base our choices on rational arguments. A person who is loss averse dislikes symmetric 50-50 bets, and the dislike increases with the absolute size of the stakes. This observation relates this work to behavioral concept dealing with preferences (p. 279). We humans do not consider gains and losses rationally–our first priority is not to lose. Even though this conclusion was drawn from work with people faced with financial decisions, we may speculate that other apparent high-stakes situations in which we stand to lose something of value might evoke similar responses. Reflecting on this idea, we can see that change of any kind is fraught with possibilities of loss. When applied to changing our teaching, these potential losses can seem to be monumental. What do we fear losing?

We fear losing content “coverage”. This principle is usually citied first and foremost when faculty confront nontraditional pedagogical choices. The tyranny of content coverage is especially acute in certain disciplines that have a recognized body of information on which subsequent courses build, fro example, the sciences and engineering. Our illusion is that we tell students the information that we want them to know, students who are motivated will absorb it, and our obligation to the discipline has been met. Thus, the most readily recognized and accepted pedagogical choice is lecture. It’s hard to argue with this premise head-on because most professors themselves learned very well by the lecture method, and it does have its place as one option in our set of pedagogical tools.

We fear losing control. What do the more student-centered strategies all have in common? They all represent shifts in the nature of authority in the classroom. They require us to move away from the idea that information may be transferred intact from expert to novice. Instead, they ask us to move toward the model of the student as self-teacher, recognizing that knowledge is of necessity constructed in the mind of the learners as they seek to reconcile new knowledge with mental models they’ve built based on former experience.

Research in cognitive science may currently be interpreted as validating the view that knowledge is constructed, not simply absorbed, yet for many of us this theory is not necessarily readily accepted. We need to believe that we can control the development of students’ ideas through our eloquent prose and detailed explanations; otherwise, it’s hard to know our role in the classroom. Interestingly, research in cognitive science also shows us how important the fear of loss of control is to human thinking (LeDoux, 1996). Our students may struggle against learning in our disciplines because they perceive that we are imposing our control over them (Zull, 2002). How much more than may we as instructors resist handing over our hard-earned position of authority to students? And we may even perceive those who encourage the use of alternate pedagogies to be someone else seeking to tell us what to do.

Proposing that we change our preferred way of teaching seems to assault us on two levels. First, the classroom has usually been an arena in which faculty work in isolation and in absolute control. We do not typically engage in collegial discussion about teaching, so raising questions about our choice of techniques may seem to be an unexpected and inhospitable attack on our professional expertise. Add to this the fact that the pedagogical methods being touted often ask the teacher to relinquish authority in the classroom to novices, and we have added insult to injury.

Fear of Embarrassment

Necessary for academic success is the ability to pose intellectual questions and to generate recognizably valid arguments to answer them. In general, most of us didn’t need to be highly adept in social situations to get where we are in academia. Yet many of the teaching modes other than lecture require us to navigate and direct human interactions, a somewhat daunting task. When working with students in groups or even facilitating a meaningful discussion, we are in danger not only of losing content coverage and control, but also of embarrassing ourselveswe fear being seen as incompetent, less smart, perhaps even just silly. As Palmer (1998) said, we fear students’ judgment of us. We fear losing respect. Most of us have spent a great deal of time honing our lecture skills in order to avoid being embarrassed in public. Asking us to step into another area of perceived performance for which we have limited training is asking a lot.

Fear of Failure

Finally, and not least importantly, we fear failurefailure to transmit critical concepts in our discipline, failure to resonate with students, failure to be perceived as experts in our field. Whatever mode of teaching we have been using represents the known. Any failures we noted in the past using these strategies have been rationalized and dealt with. To change means to bring the effects of our teaching under close scrutiny again. We may need to find different explanations for student failures and put our own performance under review and judgment again.

How Prevalent Are These Fears?

A number of anecdotal accounts document a teacher’s fears, but what does the research literature say about this phenomenon? Several studies exist on math anxiety, test anxiety, even computer anxiety, but very little on teaching anxiety-unless we lump it under the very broad category of performance or speech anxiety. Two studies dealing specifically with teaching anxiety, one among psychology professors (Gardner & Leak, 1994) and on among accounting professors (Ameen, Guffey, & Jackson, 2002), found that a large majority of faculty (78%-87%) had experienced some form of teaching anxiety, broadly defined as “distress that comes from either the anticipation of teaching, the preparation for teaching, or the experiences that occur while teaching” (Gardner & Leak, 1994, p. 29). In the majority of cases this anxiety was described by faculty as arising from external events, not existing as a part of the professor’s self-describing personality, and presenting an ongoing challenge.

In these studies, teaching anxiety was associated with some activities that involve talking to any group, such as standing before the class before speaking, but other triggers were not so related: class preparation, students’ questions, negative feedback or disruptions from students during class, and end-of-term evaluations. As one might expect, in both studies anxiety felt while teaching diminished in a statistically significant way in teachers with more experience and higher rank. The amount of teaching experience, however, did not correlate with reducing the other potential triggers of anxiety; that is, student questions and evaluations or class preparation activities, at least in the study of psychology professors (Gardner & Leak, 1994). Instructors did not significantly associate anxiety with a class format, such as discussion versus lecture, but more with lack of familiarity with course material as noted in the study of accounting professors (Ameen, Guffey, & Jackson, 2002).

Neither of these studies asked specific questions about anxiety when using alternate teaching strategies such as group work, but certainly we could speculate that the unfamiliarity with this style of teaching and the perceived loss of control could act as an anxiety trigger, perhaps in a similar way as does lack of familiarity with course material. The student-centered formats are more likely to expose professors to possible negative responses from students, an identical trigger in both studies. Both class preparation activities and student evaluations were noted sources of anxiety in these studies, and one can imagine that changing one’s teaching to include flexibility in class format and more student interaction could elicit these fears as well.