Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below looks at specific examples of general education assessment, course, program, and institutional. It is from Chapter 4, The Assessment Plan in, Assessing General Education Programs, by Mary J. Allen professor emeritus of psychology, California State University-Bakersfield and Former Director of the California State University Institute for Teaching and Learning. Anker Publishing Company, Inc. Bolton, Massachusetts. Copyright © 2006 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN 1-882982-95-9 www.ankerpub.com.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Doctoral Dissertation – Looking Back, Looking Forward

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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THREE LEVELS OF GENERAL EDUCATION ASSESSMENT

Campuses typically use one or more of three basic approaches to assessing the general education program. They focus on assessment at the course, program, or institutional level. Course-level assessment ascertains how well students have mastered learned outcomes associated with specific general education courses. Faculty who staff these courses routinely assess course outcomes, refine their courses based on results, and report findings and changes to an oversight committee. Assuming course outcomes are well aligned with program outcomes, results can be generalized to the program, as a whole.

Program-level assessment embeds assessment within general education courses, and results are summarized for the program, as a whole. For example, Noel (2001) and colleagues examined two arts and humanities learned outcomes by developing a rubric and using it to assess student products from a sample of upper-division arts and humanities courses. The focus was on the program, not each individual course.

Institutional-level assessments usually embeds assessment in advanced courses in the majors, allowing the campus to see how well learning in the general education program generalizes to learning throughout the institution. For example, students at Truman State University (2004) complete a general education portfolio in senior-level capstone courses in the major, and the portfolios are assessed to see how well students have mastered general education outcomes. This approach includes a check that students who have transferred from other institutions have developed the marks of a Truman State graduate.

Course-Level Assessment Example: San José State University

San José State University has a well-developed system for assessing the general education program at the course level, and this is a major undertaking. This campus has more than 200 general education courses that meet 18 general education requirements, and more than 500 general education course sections are scheduled each semester. Faculty who teach sections of the same general education course collaborate to assess student mastery of general education outcomes within their courses. In addition, they document other course certification requirements, such as using active learning techniques and helping students develop communication and critical thinking skills (Anagnos, Dorosz, & Wheeler, 2002). An example of their course certification requirements for the Self, Society, & Equality in the U.S. requirement is provided in Chapter 3.
Designated course coordinators submit a “Coordinator Summary” that:

* Summarizes the number of course sections that were offered and assessed
* Responds to any concerns expressed during the course certification review
* Lists the number of students who took the course and the number of students who achieved each learning outcome
* Briefly summarizes the kinds of activities that help students develop each outcome
* Highlights results that demonstrate that students have exceeded expectations
* Highlights results that demonstrate that students have not met expectations
* Describes course modifications based on assessment findings
* Summarizes what has been learned about effective ways to meet additional course requirements (e.g. providing effective feedback to develop writing skills)
* Describes the course coordination process, including faculty discussion of assessment findings
* Describes changes in the assessment plan for subsequent offerings of the course

A Coordinator Summary for the Self, Society, & Equality in the U.S. requirement is available online (David, 2001). This assessment approach results in continuing refinement of each general education course as well as ongoing collaboration among faculty who teach it.

Program-Level Assessment Example: California State Polytechnic University-Pomona

California State Polytechnic University-Pomona’s (2003) Interdisciplinary General Education (IGE) Program is an impressive example of program-level assessment. Pomona students have the option of participating in the IGE Program to meet most of their lower division humanities and social sciences general education requirements. Students complete the innovative program in cohorts, taking one course each quarter starting in their freshman year; the eighth and last course is a capstone course in which students create integrative projects that are expressed in a 15-page paper and through an alternative medium, such as a poster or work of art. About six to eight sections of each required course are offered each quarter, and about 80-100 students complete the program each year.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty, as well as adjunct faculty, offer IGE courses, and many have participated in the program for years. Around 12 faculty offer IGE courses each year, and they share responsibility for assessing the program. IGE faculty, including adjunct faculty, meet regularly to discuss the program and its assessment; each quarter the program hosts a “torch passing” in which faculty who have just taught the students “pass” them into the hands of the next instructors by sharing what they have done and what they have learned through the ongoing assessment program.

Alignment of the IGE program is planned through an alignment matrix and is made explicit during the torch passing. In addition, many of the courses are taught, and involved faculty carefully orchestrate their courses to meet program and course outcomes. Throughout the year faculty meet to discuss how their courses help students build the skills necessary for the capstone project, including attention to fostering the required information competence, critical thinking, and communication skills. IGE faculty also meet for an annual retreat each June to review progress and establish goals for the next academic year.

The IGE program is assessed in multiple ways, including both direct and indirect assessment. Students accumulate a portfolio of their work as they proceed through the program, and they evaluate their own learning each quarter. Faculty survey current students as well as alumni, and they conduct student interviews as the end of the first year, the middle of the second year, and the end of the program, faculty obtain their major direct evidence by assessing the portfolios and capstone projects, and an outside evaluator is periodically invited to visit courses and review student work.

IGE faculty consider themselves part of an ongoing learning community, and they routinely review assessment results and reflect on their implications. Over the years they have refined the capstone assignment, revised the curriculum and learning outcomes, developed effective relationships with staff at the campus library and student affairs offices, and monitored the impact of their changes on student learning (N.P. Fernandez, personal communication, July 1, 2005).

Institutional-Level Assessment Example: Truman State University

Truman State University assesses its general education program at the institutional level by embedding portfolio requirements in capstone courses taken in the majors. In 2003 approximately 83% of the graduating class submitted portfolios, and they reported spending about four or five hours develop them. Faculty who teach capstone courses assign and collect the portfolios, and some departments augment the assignment to collect additional data fro assessing majors. The assignment may change slightly from year to year, but during the 2002-2003 academic year, faculty required students to submit work demonstrating critical thinking, interdisciplinary thinking, historical analysis, scientific reasoning, and aesthetic analysis, as well as work that the student felt was most personally satisfying; a reflection on their growth while at Truman State; and anything the student would like to share about their university experience (Truman State University, 2005a).

Students receive explicit instructions for each segment of the portfolio. For example, the Spring 2005 assignment for Critical Thinking and Writing asks students to submit the best example of their writing that demonstrates critical thinking.

Please include an example of your best writing that demonstrates your critical thinking skills. As stated in Truman’s LSP [Liberal Arts and Sciences Program] outcomes, good writing is a reflection of good thinking. Thus, as a result of an intellectual process that communicates meaning to a reader, good writing integrates ideas through analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of ideas and concepts. Good writing also exhibits skill in language usage and clarity of expression through good organization. (Truman State University, 2005c, p.1)

Students identify the course from which the writing sample was drawn and their academic status when taking the course (freshman, sophomore, etc.). They specify if the writing was individual or collaborative, describe the assignment that elicited the paper, reflect on the kinds of thinking demonstrated in the writing sample, and comment on their growth in critical thinking. Faculty assess the writing samples by focusing on critical thinking, organization, style, and mechanics (Truman State University, 2005c).

Although paper portfolios were required originally, Truman State University began requiring electronic portfolios in 2005. Students go to the portfolio web site (http://assessment.truman.edu/components/Portfolio) for instructions, and they submit portfolios on disks, CDs, or other media. The assessment coordinator suggests that faculty review instructions in class and encourage students to work on different sections of the portfolio every two weeks, so that work is not done at the last minute. Students in courses requiring the portfolio must complete their portfolios before graduation, and this is certified during the graduation check process (Truman State University, 2005b).

Many portfolios are collected each year. For example, the portfolio director received nearly 1,000 portfolios in 2003-2004, and they were reviewed by 45 faculty and two staff members over a three-week period. Most faculty spent one week, working daily from around 8:00AM-4:30PM, and approximately 20 readers worked each week. Readers apply standards specified in rubrics to classify products into one of four categories: No evidence, Weak Competence, Competence, and Strong Competence (Truman State University, 2004).

Results are reported at the department, division, and university level, although only division and university results are made public in the annual Assessment Almanac, as well as at various events, such as planning workshops and faculty development luncheons (Truman State University, 2005a). The Assessment Almanacs are available online (http://assessment.truman.edu/almanac/) , allowing anyone to see the rubrics, the detailed analyses of each year’s data, and qualitative analyses of the student’s feedback about their learning and the campus.

Combining the Three Approaches

Campuses may assess at one or all levels. For example, faculty may use course-level assessment to assess each course in the college writing sequence to verify that it results in the learning required for entry into the subsequent course. Faculty may use program-level assessment to examine science outcomes by analyzing lab reports drawn from a variety of general education science courses, or a four-year institution may examine the impact of the general education science curriculum by collecting student work in upper division, general education science courses. In addition, some outcomes may be assessed at the institutional level. For example, information literacy may be introduced in general education courses, but the campus might expect further development within the majors. In this case, the combined impact of all courses might be assessed by examining student products

Folks:

Below is a very interesting edited and revised excerpt from the book “Teaching as Dialogue”, by Harvey Sarles. The book was originally published by the University Press of America in 1993 (now out of print). and this excerpt was originally published byThe Higher Education Acdemy and Practice (Health sciences and Practice) in England. www.harveysarles.com/

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Three Levels for General Education Assessment

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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TEACHING AS DIALOGUE

[…] Teaching is a messy Art. It is a relationship; a study of subject matter, of the subjective self, of politics, management, techniques. It occurs more than it exists. And it is a different order of event from the perspectives of Teacher, and of student.

I say Teacher rather than teacher because the concept of Teacher is more than a societal role. The Teacher has at least in potential the possibility of shaping minds, ideas, even of inspiring deeply the future. The teacher become Teacher contains-within the perceptions and memories, imaginations and life-unfoldings of one’s students-a continuing presence which far transcends the ordinary and mundane. The concept of Teacher contains the power to inspire and to remain alive in the thinking of those who are touched by some particular Teacher.

[…] In this age, an era where knowledge and life are eased toward bureaucratization knowledge itself has become a business. […]The question of depth, of yearning toward the attainment of wisdom, has been forsaken. Knowledge now seems to be too vast to be contained. Teachers fade into the information solicitors and inquisitors whom we now dub lecturers and facilitators.

As hope is about the future, the issue of thinking about the future in which the students will be living affects how we consider time. The recent freezing of knowledge into bureaucratic pigeonholes affects the experiencing of time. It shapes and frames time and history and the concept of futurity, quite literally. When information resides outside anyone’s actual experience, it does not necessarily relate to any futurity. Without living Teachers, how do we go on? Where is the agenda; who is reading and acting the scripts of life’s theaters?

[…]For the fearful and the weak-and who of us is not sometimes-the temptation arises to say: This is too much! For them and for us, the either/or which appears on the horizon of solution is a quick fix. We are urged to abandon trust and confidence in ourselves, in life virtually, and to trust in the texts of some ancient persons who claim genius or divine inspiration

[…] [But]What remains is us. The Teacher needs to enter into dialogue with those who are here. She nor he can tell truth, can no longer lay claim to the wisdom of all of time. What the Teacher has positively is endurance and continuing presence, a love of life and justice and knowing, and an abiding sense for the notion of hope and the future. […]

By engaging in dialogue with the young and uninformed the Teacher can get them to think, conceptualize critically and anew. […]

No doubt this is what all Teachers aim toward.

Yet here and now is where we are; where Teachers find themselves imagining their students to be more perfect than they are themselves. But here and now we are all flesh. Our lives consist of the ordinary and mundane which battle utopic wishes and transcendental temptations. The entire world has become the text of each day’s bombarding news. We find ourselves often lacking the energy necessary to complete each day, much less float beyond it.

Living in a time when the history of ideas has pushed us to technologize teaching, first by concentrating on learning and the learner, then by offering texts and machines, the very idea of the Teacher has been down-played to disappearance[…] Teaching no longer controls its own destiny. As education has become bureaucratized and like a business, it has bought each step on this technologized ladder…only to discover as it approached the top that the rungs had devoured themselves below.

[…] As our thinking is full of others, parents, friends, from past and present, so Teachers often enter in, formulate and shape thinking. For those of us who have been fortunate enough to have studied-with people who, indeed, did inspire us, this idea of Teacher remains clear and alive in current thinking-even as we age beyond the age of exposure to those whom we think of as: my, our, Teachers.

But there is also much distrust of the idea of the Teacher. Claims of technology vie with the presence of persons who teach. The programmed course and the programmed person who acts as a mediator or facilitator of knowledge seem surer and safer and pre-determined in ways that a live Teacher can never be. Why the Teacher? […]

One reason. We permit few people to touch us. Yet we are social creatures and praise love. It is within the relationship of vulnerability and power that we may locate ourselves. […]

It is in this relationship that Freire (1973) believes the future is cast. If their vulnerabilities are abused, students become oppressed…and will seek to oppress others in their own (future) time of power because this is the lesson in being they have learned. Rather, if the vulnerabilities are nurtured, explored, and overcome through dialogue, the touch of the Teacher may be used to inspire, indeed to guarantee the futurity of the students. […]

[…] As teaching is touching the minds of students, the Teacher must study students. The politics of the classroom may only mimic the Realpolitik, but they are nonetheless quite real to its students. Here students may practice, try out, be tested and test their Teachers. Granted the power inherent in the yielding of students’ spirits, we Teachers need to enter into dialogue with these students and reveal aspects of our characters…as Teachers.

Much of this pedagogy, therefore, is concerned with the nature of dialogue: its preparation, dynamics, and process; in the skills which make it possible; in the reactions it prompts; and in the competencies which help make it full […]

Dialogue is a performative art, a fast-form in which the agenda must remain partially loose, tailored to those who are actually present, each day.

Dialogue is exploration, a mode of search and critical inquiry which can direct students toward paths of solution, but leaves the future-their lives-open to be studied, lived. […]

It is in interaction, the dialogue, the sharing of spirits, of modes of thinking, that teaching is its most exquisite. It is a way, an insistent means for the Teacher who has heard it all before to remain alive in one’s own consciousness, to resist boredom, and the mere filling of the classroom. Dialogue is a means of remaining in the students’ present which the Teacher’s power may entice him or her to abandon.

… [But] teaching is incomplete whenever being a Teacher lacks substance and subject matter: what any course is about[…]If teaching overwhelms its subject matter, then the sense of any future is weakened. Students will live-out their lives, but they don’t truly live them.

As the Teacher is critical and thoughtful, dialogue is useful in enabling, inviting students to think. Dialogue can open up areas to questions whose paths toward solutions require critical thought and self-criticism. . […]

It is an obligation of teaching that Teachers be judges. This is no simple task, neither to contemplate nor to exercise. This is a terrain of some vastness. […]Teaching as Dialogue offers no direction here, only some analysis; neither prophecy nor certain prediction. It dodges, feints, and side-steps the issue by urging that Teachers direct students to engage in critical self-judgment…just as their Teacher.

Here the best the Teacher can do is provide an intellectual and personal esthetic: not only toward what is good or true, but the sense that there will always exist paths toward increasing knowledge for critical thought and judgment; that such paths will remain available; that the Teacher and her teachings through dialogue will help reveal where those paths may be found. What is called inspiration is the sense that each student will be able to search those paths in one’s own futurity, and find firm groundings along the paths and by-ways of one’s Teacher. […]

On the other hand certifying the value of each student as a real person deserving of full human beingness, is a primary political act. Real, but incomplete; needing to be broader, deeper, and confirming a long life whose possibilities remain immanent. The Teacher who enters into dialogue, who studies the vulnerabilities, who has been granted the right to judge, must judge and say what that judgment is. In the same breath the Teacher can affirm that change and growth are aspects of forward movement and offer a model of that towardness in their continuing presence.[…]

Folks:

This month’s Perspectives, written by Lee Shulman and Pat Hutchings, looks at what kinds of information these offices [of institutional research] might collect and how such data can be used to determine student engagement and achievement on campus at an institutional level. It is #24 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the CFAT. The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Proof and Prejudice: Women in Mathematics

Tomorrow’s Professor

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LEARNING ABOUT STUDENT LEARNING FROM COMMUNITY COLLEGES

Pat Hutchings and Lee S. Shulman
March, 2006

It’s hard to find a campus in these days of number crunching and accountability that doesn’t have some kind of office of institutional research. These offices vary a lot, with large research universities supporting a staff of a dozen or more, and small colleges sometimes relying on a person-or half a person-to get the job done. But what exactly is the job? Traditionally, institutional research has been treated as a kind of company audit, sitting outside the organization’s inner workings but keeping track of important trends and facts-about enrollment patterns, student credit hours, graduation rates, peer institutions, and so forth-requested by both internal and external constituencies.

But imagine a different way of thinking about institutional research as a capacity to work closely with faculty to explore questions about what students are actually learning. Such a shift would mean asking much tougher, more central questions: What do our students know, and what can they do? What do they understand deeply? What kinds of human beings are they becoming-intellectually, morally, in terms of civic responsibility? How does our teaching shape their experience as learners, and how might it do so more effectively?

As part of a Carnegie Foundation project focused on pre-collegiate, developmental education in community colleges (in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we are working with 11 institutions in California), we recently brought together a group of institutional research directors and faculty to talk about the kinds and sources of data that are needed to improve teaching and learning for the many students who are unprepared to enter college-level courses and who often fail on the long road through one remedial course after another. On the one hand, institutional research is an underfunded, undervalued function on many two-year campuses, and we heard from those who work in IR offices about the frustration of spending scarce time and resources generating information that faculty never see. At the same time, we heard from faculty who wish that the kinds of evidence that are most important for making changes at the classroom level could be made more readily available, and be more valued, at “the top.” But we also heard about some encouraging efforts to bridge these gaps.

At Los Medanos College, for example, getting better information to guide improvement has been part of a shift of focus from “the underprepared student” to “the prepared institution.” The college’s Developmental Education Committee works with staff from the Office of Institutional Research to develop a research agenda that yields data faculty members can use to monitor improvements in student learning. Recently, the Committee asked the IR office to study the relative success rates in elementary algebra of students who had different levels of preparation-requiring data much more specific than what is usually provided by the IR office for program review. “We gathered this data over a two-year period and discovered significant differences in success rates based on type of preparation,” Myra Snell, a professor of mathematics, told the group. “This information was instrumental in several changes: We established a prerequisite for elementary algebra, changed scheduling patterns in the math department, and are now experimenting with different modes of instruction for basic skills curriculum.”

City College of San Francisco-a much different, much larger institution-has developed a Web-based Decision Support System. The DSS contains data from 1998 through the present on student enrollment, student demand for classes, departmental productivity, student success as measured by grades, course completion, degrees and certificates, and student characteristics, all of which are available in response to queries from faculty and staff. Thus, an instructor of pre-collegiate English might use the system to find out if different student groups-by race or age-are particularly at risk in a key sequence of courses in which he or she is teaching. The department might use the system to see how changes in teaching and curriculum are reflected, or not, in patterns of student success over time. Importantly, we heard from CCSF institutional research staff about the need to work directly with faculty-one-on-one, in small groups, and by departments-to help them envision ways to use the information; the promise, that is, lies not only in supplying good information but in cultivating a demand for it. A study of the DSS system found that the increased availability of data has produced a shift in how individuals imagine their role in using information for decision making.

The Carnegie project meeting generated enthusiasm for further bridge-building, as well. As more and more faculty embrace the scholarship of teaching and learning and begin gathering evidence about their students’ learning, it’s exciting to think about how rich, qualitative classroom-level information can be captured and integrated into larger data systems that others on the campus can access and build on. What may be needed is not an information superhighway but a friendlier set of neighborhood paths and backstreets that take people where they need to go as educators. This, in turn, may require a different way of organizing the work of institutional research-and resources to support its more central role.

To readers who do not work on a campus, all of this may sound like inside baseball. It’s not. Questions about who talks to whom, and about what kinds of information are institutionally valued and available, are central to an institution’s capacity to improve. And while the availability of data is never a sufficient condition for improvement, it is certainly a necessary one. Community colleges-with their “can do” attitudes, and their willingness to experiment-may well have things to teach the rest of higher education about the best ways to think about the evidence needed for improvement.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Carnegie Conversations provides a public forum where you can engage publicly with the author and read and respond to what others have to say.

© 2006 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305, 650-566-5100

Folks:

The posting below, while using a particular set of subjects – tropical conservation and development – provides a model for interdisciplinary education that should appeal to many other departments and universities. The posting is an from the paper “A graduate education framework for tropical conservation and development”. and is provided by Professor Karen Kainer [kkainer@latam.ufl.edu ] of the School of Forest Resource & Conservation/ Tropical Conservation & Development Program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Department Meetings

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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A GRADUATE EDUCATION FRAMEWORK FOR TROPICAL CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Kainer, K.A., M. Schmink, J.R. Stepp, H. Covert, E.M. Bruna, J.L. Dain, S. Espinosa and S. Humphries. 2006. A graduate education framework for tropical conservation and development. Conservation Biology 20(1):3-13.

Reshaping graduate education

This complex, interrelated, and rapidly changing world has motivated universities to rethink the educational experience of society’s future leaders. In the United States, and perhaps more so in developing countries, public investment in higher education is predicated upon a return of knowledge and technology for the benefit of society. Some call for changes not to just “tweak graduate education around the edges”, but to reshape it completely.

Conventional graduate training related to tropical conservation and development has typically separated the two fields, with students focusing on either conservation from the perspective of the biophysical sciences or development as an extension of the social sciences. Employers, however, indicate that they need team members with cross-disciplinary and disciplinary depth, skills in languages, negotiation, and policy analysis.
The ability to effectively elicit and present ideas and negotiate varying interests can make or break a conservation program, regardless of technical merit. Although the traditional currency of peer-reviewed publications still holds the greatest weight within the scientific community, communicating effectively with a remarkably diverse group of stakeholders, ranging from indigenous groups to corporate CEOs, is now considered a highly desirable conservation skill.

How might graduate programs better prepare students to become this type of skilled, forward-thinking leader prepared to improve human well-being while conserving the diversity of biological wealth in the tropics? The University of Florida’s Tropical Conservation and Development Program (TCD) has been wrestling with these issues for over 15 years, and the program’s framework for managing and adapting a graduate program is a product of these years of experience.

Framework for tropical conservation and development learning and action

The TCD program, housed in the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies, was established in the 1980s. The program does not grant degrees; rather, it offers an interdisciplinary certificate that functions much like a minor. It also provides a supportive learning environment, and fellowships and research grants for M.S. and Ph.D. students who are pursuing careers in tropical conservation and development (http://www.latam.ufl.edu/tcd). Because TCD is housed in the Center for Latin American Studies, without allegiance to any particular college, it enjoys a level of autonomy and neutrality that has fostered experimentation and development of unique mechanisms that support learning and action.

Approximately one-half of all participating students are from Latin America and other tropical countries. Between 1988 and 2005, the TCD fellowship competition has awarded 248 academic-year fellowships to 145 entering and continuing students from 27 countries. The graduate education framework that has emerged from the TCD program builds on traditional disciplinary foundations, integrates past and present student experiences, and embraces collaborative learning and action. At the heart of this framework is a learning and action platform – an intellectual, social, and professionally-safe space for participants to interact and innovate. Feeding into this platform is a triad of theory, skills, and praxis with respective foci on problem-solving, personal-leadership and field application.

Problem-centered focus

The theoretical leg of the platform draws on the disciplinary depth of diverse students and faculty, encouraging transdisciplinary exploration within a problem-oriented approach. The current cohort of 88 TCD students is matriculated in over a dozen social and biophysical science units across campus. The overarching goal is for students to achieve fluency in their home discipline and competency in others. Students are encouraged to let the problem at hand guide the choice of applicable discipline(s), rather than let the discipline determine the limits of the problem itself. Intellectual heterodoxy and innovation emerge from cross-disciplinary dialogue regarding key concepts or problems.

Personal-leadership focus

A second dimension of the TCD learning and action platform is development of skilled and creative leaders. Graduate students in the program typically bring an impressive amount of experience, perhaps through a research project or work with rural communities through programs such as Peace Corps. Respondents of a 2004-2005 TCD student survey had a mean age of 32 years, and over 63% had between 1 and 6 years of work experience. Another 30% had more than 7 years of experience (n = 44). The TCD program consciously creates a space where students can reflect on and contextualize their experiences, skills, and knowledge, solidifying their learning and strengthening leadership abilities.

Traditionally graduate students are trained to develop and sharpen technical skills essential for becoming a rigorous researcher. Within the TCD program, the emphasis is on developing other complementary skills: learn outside their immediate disciplines, think in terms of linked socioecological systems, work in teams, negotiate among competing interests, and communicate in nonacademic formats. In this model, faculty act not only as experts, but also assume the role of facilitating learning, rather than controlling it. Students take greater responsibility for their own learning, build upon what they already know, and discover and define what they need to know.

Field-application focus

The third leg of the TCD platform focuses on field application of the accumulated skills and knowledge. This can also be called praxis, or “practice with reflection”. Student interact with TCD’s myriad institutional partners (of which TCD alumni are key), promoting collaborative learning and practice and building an international and transgenerational commitment to tropical conservation and development. Students learn to juggle different expectations and often competing roles as they negotiate the focus and approach of their research with academic committee members, host-country partners, and local communities.

Putting TCD into Practice

What are some of the practical ways in which the TCD Program puts this approach into practice? Rather than creating a formal degree program, TCD concentrates on developing a complementary set of activities (courses, workshops, and conferences, fellowships, research grants, and visitors). The three central goals of the program (training, research, and promotion of a learning and action network) are blended together in practice such that most programmatic decisions are based on how a particular decision might maximize gain in each of these three areas. Development of the program’s three core courses is a good example of this approach.

Coursework

Community Forest Management and TCD Research Methods are examples of a core TCD conceptual and methods courses. They are team taught by social and biological scientists, discuss key concepts and theories to address central issues from a comparative perspective across multiple scales in time and space, and draw extensively on student experience and expertise. As with other core courses, student feedback is solicited formally through written and oral evaluations. These evaluations exemplify TCD’s emphasis on continuous critical learning, improve the course, serve to keep teaching fresh and enthusiastic, and offer students a stake in the course and larger program.

Other TCD core courses provide explicit training in practical skills development. Current course options include Facilitation Skills for Adaptive Management, Conservation Entrepreneurship, and Collaboration and Conflict Management. In these course the focus is on learning and practicing the communication, facilitation, negotiation, mediation, and management skills needed by professionals in the real world. Subsequently, students who take these courses are often tapped to organize on-campus training sessions and workshops. They may also develop off-campus activities with partner institutions through the practitioner experience described below or through a paid consultancy. With faculty backstopping, these opportunities incrementally build and refine students’ skills and simultaneously develop new and strengthen existing linkages with field partners.

Alternative learning and action spaces

Although the core courses are central to the curriculum, the hallmark of the TCD graduate education program is the multiple learning opportunities outside the classroom, what we call alternative learning and action spaces. The program’s field-research grants competition is a good example of this type of space. Between 1988 and 2005, 227 grants were awarded for students to work in 33 foreign countries on projects ranging from the evaluation of collaborative management projects in Uganda to the evolutionary ecology and conservation of Neotropical birds. Graduate students compete for these annual awards based on sound scientific proposals judged by an interdisciplinary faculty panel. Each recipient is affiliated with a local organization and develops written protocols for collaboration when possible. All are required to return their research results to partner groups through locally appropriate formats. Similarly, they share their experiences and findings with others at the University of Florida through an annual TCD field research clinic.

The TCD program also offers funds for visiting professionals and “practitioner experiences,” a form of internship in which students work with a host organization, learning from them and contributing to the organization’s efforts. Recent practitioner experiences include full participation on a World Wildlife Fund evaluation team in Suriname and Guyana, and facilitation of a partner-driven workshop in Mexico on recent developments in mahogany research. In contrast, visiting professionals come to campus, and usually conduct a workshop or deliver a course session on a particular skill or approach of interest to students. While advancing their own professional goals, these visitors keep the TCD program current and create a space where students can learn from field personnel entrenched in day-to-day conservation and development realities.

Other examples of alternative learning spaces include orientations and retreats, a weekly student-led seminar series, and predeparture (field research) and proposal-writing workshops. Student teams have also organized and led multiple one-half-day or one-day workshops to share their disciplinary expertise in such diverse topics as ecological concepts for social scientists, gender analysis targeting natural scientists, and basic geographic information system skills for the nonexpert. Student-led workshops provide another forum for students to practice and fine-tune their skills. Backstopping by TCD faculty is key to the success of these workshops, ensuring that students on the delivery end have sufficient support, and those on the receiving end get a good product.

These alternative spaces do not add unnecessary course requirements to an already-packed graduate curriculum, and students indicate that they are extremely helpful in supporting immediate graduate-study needs and providing a broader perspective on professional roles. Learning and action spaces are not only for students, however, as the program places a high value on systematically and thoroughly reflecting on its activities. This type of learning is sometimes termed transformative learning because by incorporating periodic and systematic evaluation of the learning process, one is forced to critique fundamental principles and habits of doing work, often transforming or changing one’s knowledge base, skills, and attitudes. An example of this learning within TCD is the end-of-semester faculty retreats organized to discuss teaching and other program activities. Similarly, student input on program activities and strategies is solicited on a regular basis to delineate new ideas and outline corrective action. These critical moments of reciprocal learning continue to change and improve the way TCD carries out its graduate training. They also demonstrate the value of student input and collaboration, fostering trust within the program and mutual respect between students and faculty.

Program challenges

This “learning and action” approach to tropical conservation and development training begets new challenges for graduate education. The praxis elements of the program with explicit requirements to collaborate with home-country partners and return research results to local audiences, create an additional set of demands on graduate students, by redefining good research. We currently have no evidence that TCD students take longer to complete their degrees, but the academic certificate program is newly implemented, and we are monitoring this important aspect. Service demands on TCD faculty are also elevated as they seek funds for and administer new programs to support collaborative field efforts and alternative educational opportunities. In addition, faculty time and energy needed to build and maintain the necessary long-term, long-distance relationships with partners are significant and typically not rewarded within academia. Although many disciplinary advisors welcome the complementary support TCD provides their students, the program can be viewed as a hindrance to graduate studies given course requirements, muddying of disciplinary waters, and general uncertainties and tradeoffs that accompany working closely with host-country partners. Despite these challenges, adaptively-managed educational programs that emphasize a broader learning and action network of students, faculty and field partners provide the best hope for responding to the emerging challenges of tropical conservation and development.

Folks:

The posting below looks at the challenges and rewards of team teaching. The article is by Barbara Palmer and is based on a talk given at Stanford University by Professors Joshua Landy and Lanier Anderson on February 23, 2006. It appeared in the Stanford Report, Volume XXXVIII, No.20, March 15, 2006. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: A Graduate Education Framework for Producing Skilled and Creative Leaders

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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PROFESSORS PREACH TEN COMMANDMENTS OF TEAM TEACHING

By Barvara Palmer

Joshua Landy, Lanier Anderson offer ‘thou shalts’ of the craft

Joshua Landy, associate professor of French and Italian, and Lanier Anderson, associate professor of philosophy, might easily have been rivals, said Michele Marincovich, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, as she introduced Landy and Anderson’s presentation at the Center’s “Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching” lecture series on Feb. 23.

The professors, both “rising stars in the humanities firmament,” each arrived at Stanford in 1996, and both have been awarded the university’s top teaching award, the Gores Award, as well as a Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, she said. Both also have published in leading journals and have been awarded fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, she added.

But instead of competing with one another, the scholars have “converged in wonderfully productive ways,” Marincovich said. Landy, an expert in Proust, and Anderson, a specialist in Nietzsche, are the architects of an initiative in Philosophical and Literary Thought, which offers students major tracks in interdisciplinary studies of literature and philosophy. In addition to team teaching a gateway course in philosophy and literature, Landy and Anderson teach interdisciplinary courses in the Introduction to Humanities Program, together and with other instructors. (As team teachers, “we’re recidivists,” Landy said.)

In their Feb. 23 talk, the professors demonstrated their teaching technique as they presented “The Challenges and Rewards of Team Teaching.” Instead of standing at a lectern together-in Landy’s words, “like some kind of two-headed president”-Landy took the lead as lecturer, with Anderson positioned at the center of the room as “kibitzer,” setting up some of Landy’s points and interjecting his own.

Both professors compiled the list of “Ten Commandments of Team Teaching,” presented by Landy. The commandments are:

1. Thou shalt plan everything with thy neighbor.

“Plan a lot. Plan early and often. Co-design everything,” Landy advised. Everyone on the team has to be prepared to stand behind every element, he said.

A coherent course framework is vital, because team teaching makes it a little harder to keep things under control, he said. “Reassure your students there is still a line around which you are drawing this arabesque.”

2. Thou shalt attend thy neighbor’s lectures.

A course that presents five weeks of teaching from one professor followed by five weeks from another really isn’t team taught. “They’re two different classes,” Landy said. Participation by professors throughout a course not only increases its coherence but “raises the game” for the lecturing professor, he said. And it gives team members opportunities to learn new teaching strategies from each other, he said.

3. Thou shalt refer to thy neighbor’s ideas.

Team teaching is not a zero sum game, where a stellar performance by one professor takes away from the stature of another in students’ eyes, Landy said. When individual teachers are performing well, the whole course benefits, he said. “Make each other look good.”

4. Thou shalt model debate with thy neighbor.

A team-taught course offers opportunities to model high-level debate between advanced scholars, “demonstrating how two equally competent people might legitimately disagree,” Landy said. “It shows students what the range is of permissible disagreement. It’s not the case that anything goes-everything has to be argued for-but it’s also not the case that there is one monolithic approach,” he said.
Professors should “use evidence that is emblematic of your discipline,” Anderson added. Students then learn to “come from the strength of both disciplinary perspectives and step from one to the other,” he said.
“You can really show by example what kinds of questions are susceptible of this sort of beautiful openness, that there are four or five possible approaches, none of which commands a privileged right to our attention,” Landy added.

5. Thou shalt have something to say, even when thou art not in charge.

Have some view about the material, Landy said. “It may not come round to you, but your responsibility is to be ready.”

6. Ye shall apply common grading standards.

It’s time consuming and difficult, but important for a teaching team to be explicit about grading strategies and to find mutually agreed-upon standards, Landy said. Since grading standards vary from department to department, it may be that “one of you is going to have to go up and one has to go down,” he added.

7. Thou shalt attend all staff meetings.

“It’s vital to have regular meetings, which everyone should attend,” Landy said. “Keep testing the pulse of the course.”

8. Thou shalt ask open questions.

“Ask questions susceptible of multiple answers,” Landy said. “See what comes back.”

9. Thou shalt let thy students speak.

It’s important to make it clear from the first few classes that student participation is valued and expected, Anderson said. Faculty have to guard against being too technical in their responses to each another, thus keeping students out of the discussion, he said. “Police yourselves and keep things at the level of the class.”

10. Thou shalt be willing to be surprised.

Team teaching offers a special chance to take students out to the leading edge and see what the production of knowledge looks like, Anderson said. “You have to bring [students] along far enough so they know the difference between questions that they don’t know the answer to and questions that you don’t know the answer to,” he said.

It’s risky, “but the job of teaching is to communicate momentum, not just information,” said Landy. “It’s vitally important to let ourselves be wrong, to let ourselves be challenged. We have to let ourselves get into those situations where we might fail and where maybe no one is going to come up with an answer.

“Get out of the way and let the thing happen,” he said. “Just be a catalyst. Once the reaction has taken place, the catalyst gets discarded-hopefully not fired, but discarded.”