what’s the academy *for*?

There’s a trend – a trend that is worthwhile & not before time – to recognise excellence among tertiary teachers. (Where ‘tertiary’ = beyond the compulsory education sector, which is so much wider than ‘just’  universities.) In New Zealand we have the national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, which recognise & encourage excellence. These awards are funded by the Tertiary Education Commission and managed and administered by Ako Aotearoa, and winners become members of the Ako Aotearoa Academy.

Anyway, I was talking with a group of colleagues on Friday, & one of the topics of conversation was, what’s the Academy for? What does it do?

Well, if you follow that last link, & then peruse the various sections & links on the Academy page, you’ll find it does quite a lot, both for its members & also to foster excellence in learning & teaching across the tertiary education sector: workshops, teaching tools & narratives, the annual symposium for academy members (which is a most excellent event), and a range of member contributions.

All this truly is wonderful stuff – and yet, there’s something that worries me. Because, outside the sector, both Ako Aotearoa & the Academy have, well, quite a low profile. I believe there is a risk – especially in the current economic climate – of the Academy in particular being seen as something of an echo-chamber for the teaching elite, with the associated question: why, in tight financial times, should it continue to be funded? Having a lowish profile is Not Good in these circumstances, because it means that there are few people outside the Academy & Ako Aotearoa who would argue for its continued existence, or mourn its disappearance.

Which would be a pity. Because, having a body of expert teachers actively sharing that expertise means that, over time (& alongside other Ako activities), knowledge that contributes to enhanced teaching practices will spread. Because, when that happens, so too will learning and learners’ experiences be enhanced, so that society can be ever more sure that those learners are prepared for what the 21st century can throw at them. Because, we have so much to contribute (the current debate on what constitutes excellence in secondary school teaching springs to mind).

It’s just that somehow, at the moment, we’re just not very good at getting that across.

how much do we value our teachers?

Here in New Zealand I find that topics related to education (its quality, delivery, cost & so on) are never far from the headlines. So I’ve been following the various media reports on class sizes and performance pay for teachers with considerable interest. This afternoon I was sent a link to an article in the National Business Review - the article itself was quite… interesting (surely the number of teachers in this country hasn’t increased from 10-11,000 to 52,500 over the last decade? Why didn’t the reporter question that statement?), but it’s something in the comments thread that I’d like to address here.  ’Anonymous’ remarked that

Police should get a lot more pay than teachers. They put their lives on the line every day , they have to deal with some of the worst members of our society on a daily basis , they work 8 fullon hours each day and usually 10 hours(with no extra pay) unlike teachers who have plenty of free time , they work shift work which is very disruptive to family life and they only get the 20 days holiday each year that most workers get . Compared to those in the police,school teachers have the good life believe me…..

I agree, members of our police force do all of this & earn every cent of their salaries. But I can’t agree with the implication that teachers, & the job teachers do, are somehow less valuable to society. Just how much value do we place, should we place, on those people society expects to prepare our young people for the increasingly complex demands of the world beyond school?

We need to remember, too, that in some cases teachers’ lives are also on the line.

And I must strongly disagree with the statement that teachers get ‘plenty of free time’. I’ve worked with an awful lot of dedicated, highly skilled teachers over the years since I moved back to university from my own secondary school classroom, and both my experiences & theirs belie that ‘free time’ statement. Teachers spend around 5 hours a day actually in the classroom, with up to 30+ students at a time (with the possibility of more, under the changes recently flagged by the Ministry). Typically there are meetings before & after school, & grounds duty on a rostered basis – and let’s not forget that a teacher doesn’t ‘just’ teach in a particular subject area but spends time on things like pastoral care as well.

The extra-curricular activities that add so much richness to students’ school experiences wouldn’t be possible if teachers didn’t offer their services in lunch breaks, after school, in weekends & holidays: something for which they don’t get extra pay, either, and which – from personal experience – can also be very disruptive to family life. (The NZ International Biology Olympiad teams, for example, owe their considerable success to the fact that classroom teachers give up evenings, weekends & holidays to coach, assess & mentor them.) And then there’s the marking, lesson-planning, report-writing, keeping up with all the other paperwork, parent-teacher interviews, all of which chews into the evenings & weekends, & those on-the-face-of-it generous ‘holidays’ as well.

Free time on a daily basis? I don’t think so.

in the lecture theatre – but definitely not giving a lecture!

Today’s class was a real experiment for me, & although I try lots of different things in my classes, it was also a step outside my normal comfort zone. (But hey! life would be a bit boring if we always stayed safely inside that zone!) Why? Because I put into practice an idea I stole from my friend & colleague Kevin Gould (who also very kindly let me use the resources he’d developed): today was ‘design-a-plant’ day, & probably to anyone looking into the lecture theatre during the first 30 minutes or so it would have looked as if chaos definitely ruled.

Last Friday I gave everyone an information sheet: descriptions of the features of leaf, stem & root that you might see in plants adapted to different environments. Today I trotted off to the lecture room with a box full of overhead transparency sheets, overhead pens, & printed scenarios (descriptions of a particular environment). The lecture theatre was already full – everyone had come ahead of time! This definitely wasn’t usual (it’s not that they normally trickle in late, but we’re talking seriously early) – obviously they were expecting something special. Gulp.

So I put up these slides:

then once they’d sorted out their groups I dished out pens, transparencies, scenario sheets (& copies of the info sheet for those who’d forgotten them), & away we went on a mutual journey of discovery. After all, this wasn’t my idea & I had no idea how it would really work out.

Well! The class erupted into happy, productive noise. I know it was productive because while they talked, argued, explained & persuaded, I circulated, listened in, & answered the occasional question. Those with computers had them open – looking up information related to their scenario. (Next time someone asks a question that I can’t answer on the spot, I’m jolly well going to get someone else to google it for me!) They drew, & altered their drawings, & drew some more. The original 20 minutes stretched towards 30, & still they were focused on what they were doing. I was almost sorry to interrupt :-)

Then, I called for volunteers. A hand went up almost immediately, & its owner came down to the overhead projector, not looking too nervous. She picked up the microphone, described her group’s scenario, & showed – & explained – their response. The next speakers followed just as quickly, and each speaker received a round of applause as they finished.

But the proof’s in the pudding – just what sort of plant had they designed? Well, they didn’t necessarily look like plants that my botanical colleagues could have put a name to, but nonetheless, the explanations each group gave for their particular design were sound, & science-based. They’d obviously taken on board not only the info on that fact sheet, but also the material we’d been looking at in lectures & that they’d found on line. And they’d had fun doing it. (I particularly liked the Nepalese Death Vine – the eerie noise of the wind passing through its herbivore-deterring spines apparently puts the locals off harvesting it, lol – and the Serengeti ‘cactus’ that traps water in basin-like leaves, but when there’s a fire the plant’s transpirative water loss is such that its tissues become flaccid and it wilts, spilling that water onto the ground where the dampness keeps the worst of the fire at bay.) Plus – so far, the feedback for this exercise on our Moodle page is all positive: students felt it definitely helped their learning about plants.

Thanks, Kevin – your design-a-plant lesson got an A+ from all of us today!

the tutor’s tale: how i keep my teaching fresh

I’m lucky to work with some wonderful teachers in my job. One of them, Brydget, runs all our first-year bio labs & is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of what we offer in order to enhance the students’ learning experiences. (I am extremely envious of the fact that she’s the only person I know who routinely gets a perfect ’1′ in students’ appraisals of her teaching.)

Anyway, Brydget recently wrote a piece on how she keeps her teaching fresh, for the University’s in-house teaching journal, & has very kindly allowed me to reproduce it here :-)

Anyone in academia realises that there just aren’t enough hours in the day.  When I first started teaching I had plans of learning more about teaching, I envisioned myself understanding pedagogies and theories and thought I’d regularly read education journals.  I was soon to realise that while it was a nice idea it was not going to happen.  However, I was still determined to learn more about teaching.  The biggest resource I was to learn was not the myriad of academic journals but my colleagues both within and external to my department.

Communication with others in the university has been the biggest factor in keeping my teaching fresh.  Through participating in TDU seminars and the teaching network meetings I’ve been able to talk to teachers outside of my faculty.  This has been invaluable.  It opened my eyes to the fact that we become very entrenched in the way we do things.  It’s always been that way so it must be right.  Going through university right from the undergraduate level we become accustomed to a certain style of teaching and assessing, as students we accept that this is the norm.  When all the papers are presented in a certain way it seems that must be the right way.  And thus when moving roles from student to teacher it is unsurprising that we emulate the styles with which we were taught.  As a new teacher, I knew no different, I had not been exposed to many different ideas.

Being able to converse with teachers from different disciplines opened a new world.  At the TDU seminars I would hear what seemed like impossible ideas.  What do you mean we should give them a marking schedule?  Shouldn’t they have to work out the question, interpreting what I’m asking is all part of the mystery.  The more I talked with others the more I realised that teaching has to evolve and sharing ideas is such a valuable tool.

Even within a discipline, the act of just talking with colleagues about what they are doing in the classroom can open you to new ideas.  A simple conversation in the tea room, or attending the school teaching advocacy sessions allows for this exchange of ideas.  We tend to think of teaching as something we do in isolation (even with 200 students watching us) but we need the feedback and advice of those around us if we hope to keep our teaching alive and avoid the tedium that can come with repetitive teaching.  I am lucky that I teach in a role that allows me time to regularly talk to my students and from them I can gain feedback.  In every class students are given an opportunity to write down comments through the use of a “feedback box”, in addition to being encouraged to post on moodle.

One of the natural ways I keep my teaching fresh is purely through identifying a need.  In the first year of teaching it seems to be more about getting through (and hoping you don’t make a fool of yourself).  Once you’ve made it through that year it is like you’ve passed this first test and you start to settle in to teaching.  This is when I was able to change my focus and started identifying problem areas both in my teaching, and the courses I taught in general.  Any good teacher is going to address these problems.  Sometimes the problems are easy to fix, other times they take some creative thinking.

A few years ago I realised that one area of my teaching just was not working, the students were disengaged and found the topic a bore.  So like most of us I started thinking how I could alter this, and as I started planning I starting to keep a journal with ideas.  At first it was very factual and rudimentary, focusing on experimental change.  To my surprise the nature of the journal changed, as I implemented my new teaching strategies I started recording students reactions.  The changes brought about conversations with students that were unexpected, they moved beyond what I was teaching and asked questions.  Writing down these conversations I began to see the value in keeping a journal.  I was later to learn that this was called being a reflective practitioner.  This one small change helps keep my teaching fresh because it is a constant reminder of what I’m doing, what is working, what I did in the past and how the students are reacting.

With time and confidence you start casting your net wider.  I’ve joined online communities, forums and blogs all allowing us to share our problems, successes and ideas.  I’ve become more familiar with some of the education terminology and while I’m not quite at the stage of regularly reading journals, articles from education periodicals are becoming more frequent in my reading list.

how do you give feedback to university teachers

How do you give feedback to university teachers? – this was the search ‘topic’ used by one visitor to Talking Teaching. It struck a chord with me as I’m part of a small group of people discussing that very question, so I thought it might be a good topic for a blog. Not least because actually sitting down & writing about it should help to focus my own thoughts on the issue.

My institution expects teaching staff to carry out regular appraisals of their papers & their teaching in those papers.While there are a number of ways to do this, in practice most people use the ‘standard’ form: a set of Likert-scale questions on both paper & teachers that are common to all appraisals; a set of open-response questions (identify 3 things about this paper/teacher that should be changed/kept the same); &, if the lecturer chooses, some other questions as well. (Last year I included a set about student’s perceptions of Panopto, for a research project that I’m running with a couple of colleagues.) So there’s potentially quite a bit of information available there.

It’s what happens to this information, of course, that matters. Here, the current state of play sees lecturers receive a summary of the Likert question responses, plus any demographic information, fairly soon after the semester ends. Once the grades for the semester are finalised, we’re then sent the original survey forms, so we can then read the open-ended material as well. Both lots of information are potentially extremely useful if you’re wanting to improve paper delivery & your own teaching. The thing is – does everyone actually read it? Anecdotal evidence would suggest not: that the sheaf of paper may sometimes simply be flicked through (at best) before relegation to the paper-recycling device commonly known as a rubbish tin. When this happens, both students & teacher miss out. The students have spent time engaging with the questionnaire & do have a right to expect that their words will be read & (hopefully) responded to. And the lecturer may have missed out on suggestions that might allow them to enhance their paper’s delivery. And of course, there’s no closing of the feedback loop – letting the class know that you’ve read their comments & suggestions, & explaining how & why (or why not) you’re intending to respond to them. This in turn can see students becoming quite disillusioned with the whole process.

One of the options we’ve discussed, as a means of improving this part of the system, is whether to provide teaching staff with a summary of the open-ended questions as well, perhaps with a commentary alongside: “X% of the class felt that…. This suggests that… – have you considered the following.. ?” This, of course, would constitute a lot of extra work for our Teaching Development staff!

And there’s also the question of whether this is the best, or the only, way of getting feedback on one’s teaching.What about on-going formative feedback during the semester, using techniques like one-minute papers or ‘muddy questions’ (in which students highlight the points in a lecture that most puzzled or confused them)? Or the use of feedback surveys in learning management tools like Moodle? There’s also the issue of perceived legitimacy – I’ve heard it said that students don’t know enough about a given subject to give any meaningful comment. (While this is likely true about the content it’s certainly not the case for the methods – students do have a fairly good idea of the teaching styles & tools that work best to enhance their learning.) Would feedback be better coming from peers rather than students? How comfortable would lecturers be with having a colleague sitting in on their classes & providing constructive comments afterwards?

I seem to be posing more questions than I’ve answered! Please feel free to weigh in with your suggestions :-)

assessment for learning

A month or so back, my friend  Grant asked if I would follow up on my promise to write something on assessment. It would be great to get a discussion going around how & why we assess students, so after a bit of thought I decided to kick things off with the following post, derived from my own teaching portfolio document. (I rather feel that I need to be careful that too many of my posts don’t become Oracian in length! Not that there’s anything wrong with Orac’s posts!) It was originally posted over at Sciblogs.

For all teachers, the $64-question is whether students are learning (and, whether they’re learning what we would wish them to learn!). Assessment is the usual tool for finding this out, although it may have unintended consequences when the nature of the assessment task shapes what and how the students learn. It took me a while to realise this – and it may be that many tertiary teachers still don’t realise this, perhaps because they are focused on teaching the content in a particular discipline rather than on the best methods for doing that.

Students tend to focus on tests and final examinations, which are forms of ‘summative’ assessment; they give the assessor an indication of where the students are at, at the end-point of a program or part thereof. The downside of this is the situation where students use techniques such as rote learning to prepare for these assessments, without necessarily taking the information on board for the long term. This is exacerbated when lecturers ask questions that simply test recall rather than in-depth understanding. Far better to ask a mix of questions, with some that can be answered through recall of facts sitting alongside those that require comprehension, understanding, and critical thinking. Students who tend to use surface-learning approaches can attempt the recall-type questions. but the ‘deep’ questions encourage and reward deep-learning strategies. This mix of questions means that it’s possible to use summative assessment techniques to encourage a ‘desired’ style of learning and thinking, particularly if you let students know in advance the type of question that they can expect.

Now, if summative assessment gives you (& the students) a snapshot of where they’re at by the end of a paper, how can you use assessment to improve their learning along the way? By using a range of formative assessment strategies to build student capability, understanding, and confidence.

Formative assessment takes many forms. The most obvious is probably written feedback on reports and essays – time-consuming to deliver, but far more useful to students than simply giving them a grade. UK educator Phil Race suggests giving feedback almost immediately andwithout a grade – because often the student will look at the grade and then pretty much ignore your carefully-crafted comments. Bridget & I try to do this with the essays our students write in first-year, by giving everyone some generic feedback on the issues that we know from experience will be very common. Then we don’t have to address all that individually & can focus on the specific areas with each essay that are good or in need of improvement. Having a good marking rubric – provided to the students along with the essay topics – is a big help with this. In fact, having that rubric also means (says Phil) that you can also get students to evaluate their own work. This may sound a bit counterintuitive but it’s a good way of encouraging them to reflect on the quality of what they’ve done.

Reviewing initial drafts can also help develop a range of process skills, although with a large class I doubt that teaching staff could actually look at them all! On the other hand, you can encourage students to give this sort of feedback to each other during tutorials; it’s a good learning experience for both the reporter & the reportee… Whatever way it’s done, while university assessment practices remain centred on written tests and exams, it’s really important to help students develop these skills. For example, extended essay-type answers are expected to show the writer’s understanding of key concepts and the ability to think critically about information from a range of sources. Yet science students fresh from the NCEA may not have these skills, because even ‘discuss’ questions require only relatively brief answers. So finding ways to provide meaningful formative feedback on essay assignments gives students valuable learning opportunities & also makes it more likely that they’ll develop the deep learning skills needed for real mastery of a subject.

I’ve written previously about other, in-class techniques that can provide students with immediate formative assessment on where they’re at with their understanding of a subject (here, and here, for example). Actually, the lecturer gets formative feedback too – if class responses to an item show a general lack of understanding on an issue, then that should be a pretty clear signal that I need to try a different approach :-) Over the years that I’ve been teaching I’ve increasingly incorporated some of these techniques, & one that both I & the students (judging from their comments eg “I really like the little quizzes in lectures, the conversations, and the freedom to ask questions”) find useful is in-lecture pop quizzes.

The way I use them, each quiz consists of one or a few questions that either examine students’ prior knowledge of a concept we’re going to discuss, or test their memory & understanding of concepts just covered. Students discuss their responses with each other & then I display the answers on screen & explain why I think a particular response is the correct one. (Quite often this will lead to further discussion.) There’s no pressure, no marks, but the class gets immediate feedback on where they’re at. Plus, the use of techniques like this can lead to greater student engagement and promote more active learning.

As well as encouraging students to think more deeply and critically, teaching methods like this also help them to make connections between concepts and ideas, and with their existing knowledge framework. Sometimes this can be a bit uncomfortable, when you find that existing & new information simply don’t fit together & you have to do a bit of hard analysis of your viewpoint (the ‘troublesome knowledge’ that Michael Edmonds wrote about on Sciblogs NZ). And the evidence is there that learning to link concepts in this way does have a positive outcome for our students: while for ‘recall’ questions there was no difference between students who’d learned concept mapping & those who had not, for big-picture and interpretive questions there was a statistically significant improvement in pass rates for the concept-mapping group (Buntting et al., 2005).

Of course, assessment is only part of a bigger picture. Whatever the assessment techniques you use, they have to fit within papers with a clear outline of their structure & content, so that students are aware from the start of the material they will be covering. (If you’ve read an earlier post on visualising a curriculum, you’ll know that this does come with a caveat.) They need to know how – and why – the course will be assessed. It’s also a good idea to spell out your expectations of the students, and what they can, in turn, expect from their lecturers. All these things work together to encourage students to develop an independent, deep-learning approach to their studies – & set them up for learning for life.

Now I need to get on & write something about assessment & learning objectives…

C.Buntting, R.Coll & A.Campbell (2005) Using concept mapping to enhance conceptual understanding of diverse students in an introductory-level university biology course. Paper presented at the 36th annual conference of the Australasian Science Education Research Association. 

challenges in teaching biology

I spent Monday & Tuesday of this week down in Wellington, attending the 2nd First-Year Biology Educators’ Colloquium. (Yes, that’s a mouthful! We usually just say FYBEC to those in the know.) It was really refreshing to spend time focusing on how we teach first-year biology at university, and on research into ways to enhance that teaching.

The first keynote was by Pauline Ross, who’s at the School of Natural Sciences, University of Western Sydney. Pauline’s won a large number of teaching excellence awards & it was a real privilege – & a pleasure! – to learn from her. She started her talk by identifying a number of things (aka the ’7 deadly ways to see’) that can offer significant challenges to students beginning their uni-level studies in biology. But before I get onto those, I’m going to quote Pauline’s own words on receiving an Australian national teaching excellence award:

Although biology is supposedly the “easiest” of the science disciplines, research on student learning has shown that even high calibre, high achieving biology students at elite institutions taught by universally admired academics, fail to build a scientifically conceptual and contextual foundation in biology, perhaps because learning, teaching and assessment strategies in the discipline of biology have become ritualised. [However, a Kuhnian] paradigm shift allows me to communicate a deep conceptual and contextual understanding of biology to students. At the cornerstone of this paradigm shift is creativity; requiring students and staff to relearn their capacity for creativity and self-belief; inquiring, uncovering and overcoming barriers in their conceptual understanding, so that they think and practice as biologists.

Which pretty much sets the stage for the idea of the 7 deadly ideas (actually there were only 6, but the ’7 deadly sins’ thing has a certain resonance!).

(1) First up was content, something that we have an awful lot of – and of course this is as much an issue for secondary school teachers as it is for those of us at university. The textbook I use with my classes, Campbell Biology, seems to get thicker with each new edition as the frontiers of our knowledge continue to expand. Ross asks, can we decrease our coverage of content? How do we decide just which are the key content areas for students to learn about? She suggests that we should pay more attention to the research on threshold concepts, something that my colleague Michael Edmonds has previously written about over on Sciblogs.

Mastery of a threshold concept is sort of an ‘aha!’ moment, says Ross, because it opens your eyes to new ways of exploring a topic. (As Michael says, they’re sometimes called ‘troublesome knowledge’, because they can clash with existing worldviews and (mis)conceptions. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as it can – should? – lead to a re-examination of those views & conceptions in the light of this new knowledge.) Placing more weight on threshold concepts may mean there’s a reduction of content overall, but it should also lead to a much deeper conceptual and contextual understanding. And that is definitely a Good Thing, as when students don’t understand they are stuck, unable to really move on in their learning. While they may be quite active in trying to gain understanding, they can also be quite confused and anxious – & they can stay that way, says Ross, for months.

So, considering threshold concepts rather than simply focusing on content knowledge can provide us with a new tool for revisiting and reviewing our teaching curricula.

(2) Next in the list was process. This is something I believe all tertiary science educators should ask themselves: do our students really graduate with all the science process skills that we fondly imagine they do? After all, our graduate profile probably says that they can do x, y, & z – but what opportunities do we give them to actually practise thinking like a scientist, for example? (Hint: they won’t learn it by osmosis.) We really do need to teach science as a fluid process, not as a fixed body of knowledge (all that content again!) – and to give students plenty of opportunity to experience that fluid process that is the essential nature of science. Similarly, the writing and literacy skills that we’d like them to have – are we providing sufficient opportunities to practice and learn those skills? Here Ross gave the example of meiosis & mitosis: we tend to teach about these forms of cell division as a series of steps (interphase, prophase etc) but we don’t teach their significance in context. She argues that if we want students to do more in (say) exams than simply parrot the names and chromosome states of those steps, then we need to give relevant, everyday examples to which they can anchor their knowledge. Her example was a question about a grazed knee that needed some pretty deep knowledge and writing about cell division to answer – & which couldn’t be answered but just listing those steps.

Of course, that would require some reasonably large changes in assessment (see # 5)…

This is getting a bit long :-)

(3) Inquiry ie inquiry-based learning, something that’s intimately linked to process. This is gaining in emphasis in schools & it’s worried me for some time that students who’ve gained by learning using this approach in school must find ‘traditional’ university teaching rather a rude shock. It’s why Brydget (our wonderful first-year tutor) & I are always looking for ways to include more possibilties for genuine inquiry-based learning in our lab classes, for example, & it’s possible to do the same in lectures using opportunities for group problem-solving sessions. As Carl Wieman & his team (among others) have shown, this sort of approach enhances engagement & improves learning outcomes, while also giving the opportunity to practice thinking like a scientist. What’s not to like?

(4) Language ie jargon. There’s an awful lot of it. Yes, of course there are technical terms that students must master, but we need to ensure that mastery is properly scaffolded. I had an ‘aha!’ moment at this point, because Ross commented even saying a word correctly can help with learning it, but we seldom give them the chance to practice. (Phil Bishop picked up on this in his own presentation, noting that very few of his students could say ‘coelom’ correctly.)

(5) Assessment. Ah, I could write a whole post, in fact several of them, about assessment. Probably will, at some point. (At which point the audience may step away from the computer & walk, not run, from the room, lol.) Suffice it for now to say that how we assess has a very significant impact on how, and what, students learn – and that we may use too much of the type of assessment that encourages shallow, not deep, thinking and learning and which works against deep conceptual and contextual understanding.

(6) And innovation – how much do we really value and encourage it, Ross asks. Not innovation for innovation’s sake, but innovation for good pedagogical, research-based reasons, that changes how we teach (including assessment) in ways that should have a positive impact on how students learn. Things like the ‘flip teaching’ described by Deslauriers, Schelew & Wieman (2011), for example, and which Kevin Gould has trialled with his first-year botany students at Victoria University: they’re given a handout of information on all sorts of things (shade/sun leaves, controlling gas exchange/water loss, etc), tasked with designing a plant for a particular environment – & then asked to present their design to the rest of the class.

I am so going to steal that one, Kevin!

visualising a curriculum

Sorry about the long break in my postings – I’ve been ridiculously busy at work & my limited spare time has gone into walking the dog & making up new recipes for the family’s dinners (both walking & cooking are a really good de-stress mechanism for me). Anyway, I’m trying to get back into it now & the following item is a cross-post from the Bioblog (where I am also kick-starting my writing).

I’m always looking around for ways to improve my teaching, & my students’ learning. (The two go hand in hand. I might think I’m a good teacher, but unless my classroom practices improve my students’ learning experiences & outcomes, then I’m not. Not really.) Part of my search involves quite a bit of reading from the science education literature, and recently I read something that gave me a bit of a wake-up call. As Brydget (who runs our first-year labs) said, “it seems so obvious when you think about it!”, but neither of us had actually thought from that particular viewpoint before?

So what was the idea that made us that little bit uncomfortable, & shifted our thoughts on communicating science in the classroom? (That discomfort, incidentally, is a Good Thing, & something we should seek to elicit in our students every now & then.) It’s contained in my current ‘light reading’: a book by Linda Nilson (2007) called The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map.

I bought the book because I’d been wondering for a while how better to communicate with my first-years about my papers: what they’ll be doing, when they’ll be doing it, that sort of thing. There’s always been a proportion of the class who fairly obviously don’t bother reading the ‘standard’ paper outline (they’re the ones who are startled to find out that yes, there’s a test tomorrow night! even though that information is there in black-&-white in the paper outline that they received on the first day of semester. That, plus the fact that I use concept maps a fair bit in my teaching anyway, made Nilson’s book catch my eye.

We use paper outlines (syllabi – or should that be syllabuses??) to communicate (we think!) a lot of information to our students. Of course there’s the list of topics to be taught & when they’ll be taught, plus a list of student learning outcomes. (The latter are intended to allow the students to judge their progress towards the paper’s goals.) But then we include a whole pile of administrative stuff, like required textbooks, due dates for items of assessment, what constitutes plagiarism & why they should avoid doing it… And we expect them to read all of it.

Nilson suggests there are good reasons why many students don’t or, if they do, why they don’t seem to process the information particularly well. Part of the problem may be that the syllabus is all text – she cites research indicating that [only] half of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States read a book of any kind in 2002, and only 22% of 17-year-olds read daily in 2004. And worse – for many of those who do read the document, it may not actually make much sense to them.

This is the point where Brydget & I had that ‘aha’ moment. When a lecturer puts together a paper outline, they do it from the perspective of someone who’s totally mastered the content and the language involved. But for students, especially first-year students who are ‘content novices’, it’s a different story:

Even if students do read the syllabus, the content-heavy sections might not make much sense to them. Certainly one of the most content-laden sections is the schedule of topics that the course addresses. The topics usually contain technical terms of the discipline, terms with which the students are initially not familiar. if they already knew these terms, they wouldn’t be in the course to learn about them. Not surprisingly, the topics in syllabi in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering are almost exclusively technical worlds that a typical student wouldn’t understand until well into the course.

This is actually a deeper issue than a simple failure to read all that ‘stuff’ at the start fo the study guide, or in the first handout of the semester. It may also mean that the students don’t get any real idea of how the course is organised. You might think, “what does this matter? They’ll have it sussed by the end of the semester.” But there’s more to it than that. When we learn new things, if we’re to learn them in any meaningful way we need to be able to fit them into some sort of mental scaffolding, or schema. As Nilson says,

learning and storage take place only in the context of a logically organised conceptual framework. Deep processing, as opposed to simple memorisation, necessitates seeing the structure of new knowledge and integrating it into one’s existing structure of prior knowledge.

What’s more,

Our thinking is so dependent on structure that if we don’t have an established, complete logical structure to interpret and explain an observed phenomenon, we will make up connecting pieces or entire theories.

So there’s a real risk that many students won’t actually be learning what we think they’re learning, however well-structured our classroom teaching practices may be. So how can we help them understand the organisation of a course, so that they can use that to help incorporate the things they’ll be learning into their existing body of knowledge? nelson suggests the use of ‘visual’ syllabi that present course structure in flow charts or concept maps, showing what they’ll be learning (both content & process knowledge), how it all fits together, and how it links to material they might have already learned and to future courses.

I’ve used concept maps in class for years now, but while I know how well they help students to come to a deep understanding of complex information, I’d honestly never thought of using them to visualise the organisation of an entire paper. So that’s my next little project – to develop such a visual syllabus for the first-year biology papers I coordinate. And, at the end of the semester, I’ll be asking students for some feedback, so that I can gauge how useful that schema might have been to their own learning.

After all, my own learning journey is nowhere near its end :-)

Linda B. Nilson (2007) The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map. pub. Jossey-Bass. ISBN978-0-470-18085-3

engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering

This is another little something that I originally wrote for the Bioblog. It’s a look at a new report published by Ako Aotearoa, the organisation charged with promoting and enhancing tertiary teaching excellence here in New Zealand.

My eye was caught by that title to a paper just out on the Ako Aotearoa website (click here for the summary document & here for the full report). The sub-title is The pathway from secondary to university education, a topic that is dear to my heart.

Tim Parkinson & his co-authors were keen to get a handle on just how university students make the transition from secondary school to university, and how they become/remain engaged with science during that process. The project’s underlying aims were to:

• improve student engagement in the study of science at university;
• improve the transition from the school learning environment to that of university;
• identify and promolgate pedagogical ‘best practice’ for science education in the first year at university.

(I know this is nit-picking, but surely the aim was to provide information that will help universities enhance student engagement and transition, using a range of ‘best practice’ options identified during the project. They weren’t looking at whether particular interventions actually had that result.)

In order to know how to make these changes, you really need to know what’s currently happening – and also how lecturers & students percieve what’s happening in their classrooms. We already know (eg Buntting, 2006) that there’s a mismatch between lecturer & student perceptions about prior knowledge, in biology at least, so I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the same mismatch exists around perceptions of teaching quality and engagement. The research team looked at all this using a combination of questionnaires & focus groups, working with secondary school science students (N=421), university students in their first year of a science degree (N=630), school science teachers (N-33) and uni science lecturers (N=69). Each of the four groups in the study answered the same questions, although the wording differed a bit depending on the group. For example,

Teacher questionnaire: I give students the opportunity to influence the way that they are taught. Student questionnaire: I am given the opportunity to influence the way I am taught.

(Parkinson et al, 2011; answers were scored on a 5-point Likert scale.)

As you might expect, it turns out that lecturers’ style, personality & enthusiasm had a big impact on students’ engagement with science at university, and on their ability to move smoothly from secondary school to higher-level study. But the lecturers’ abiltiy to present information in contexts that students see as relevant to their own specific interests is also important – not least because this would allow students to fit that information into their own internalised understanding of & knowledge about science (their ‘schema’). In addition

learning science in a contemporary context… stimulates engagement, and students enjoy learning when it is connected with a sense of discovery.

And there were definitely notable differences in perceptions related to teaching and learning. For example, the team commented that

… school and university students thought less highly of the abilities of their teacher in [the area of teacher qualities ie things like presentation skills, quality of feedback] than did the teachers and lecturers themselves. For example, university and school learners perceived their lecturers’ qualities to be of a moderate standard, whereas lecturers themselves reported that their own lecturing qualities were of a high standard.

Something that I found intriguing was that none of the groups felt that self-directed learning was a significant facet of classroom activity – its reported frequency fell around ‘sometimes’ and ‘rarely’. Our graduate profile document indicates that we expect students to be independent learners by the time they complete their degree – developing the necessary skills must surely begin in first year! Surely there’s a need – noted by the researchers in their summary, to make sure that we reward such things as critical thinking and other higher-order learning skills (which of course has an impact on how we assess our students’ learning).

It is tricky for uni staff though, for our students come into class with a wide range of previous learning experiences, depending on what subjects and which standards they’ve studied at school. This means that we’re a bit between a rock & a hard place, needing to extend able students with a lot of existing content knowledge without losing those who might not have the same skills or learning experiences. Parkinson & his colleagues suggest that universities – certainly university staff engaged in first-year teaching – need to become much more aware of the learning outcomes gained by students in their NCEA studies. This would mean that those lecturers would be able to

build on the diversity of knowledge that results from the standards-based NCEA high school education.

It occurs to me that doing this would send a powerful message to students – that their lecturers really do care about helping manage the transition from school to uni and are personally interested in their learning outcomes. (I don’t mean to suggest that we aren’t, only that students may not perceive things that way!) And that can have a big impact on how students perceive and approach their studies.

C.Buntting (2006) Educational issues in tertiary introductory biology. PhD thesis, University of Waikato.

T.J.Parkinson, H.Hughes, D.H.Gardner, G.T.Suddaby, M.Gilling & B.R.MacIntyre (2011) Engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering (full report) Ako Aotearoa ISBN 978-0-473-18900-6 (online)

‘small-group’ teaching in the ‘large-group’ context

This is a cross-post of something I first wrote for my ‘other’ blog :)

Today I was involved in a session on ‘large-group teaching’, run by our Teaching Development Unit. (Secondary teachers can probably skip this post as most likely what I’m going to talk about is pretty much routine for you.) Why? Well, there’s a fairly common perception that ‘the’ model to use in large first-year science classes is the bog-standard lecture: an academic discourses on a particular topic & students take notes. I accept that this may be seen as a bit of a caricature & I do know that not everyone teaches this way, but it is the way that most lecturers of my generation were taught & we do tend to model that sort of thing.

Anyways, back to the chase. What do I see as a ‘large’ group, an average lecture size? Well, Waikato is a smallish institution so my ‘large’ classes have around 200 students in them. But I need to say up front, I don’t think there’s actually much difference in how I teach a class of 20 and a class of 200. Maybe it takes a bit more planning with a large class, but the same techniques work with both.

When you’re on my side of the lectern it’s worth identifying, up front, the things you want your students to get out of your teaching. I see myself as educating my students in the broadest sense – that means I want them to take the information, the concepts, the ideas, the perceptions of how science works & how it sees the world, and fit them into the personal intellectual framework that lets them make sense of the world (the keynote at an e-learning symposium I attended last week called this framework a ‘schema’). To me, when I’m working with students, what I’m hoping for is that I’m helping them incorporate those new data points, & the new way of thinking I’m presenting, into their personal schema.

So I’d like to think that my lectures are exciting, sometimes, and entertaining, sometimes, and engaging – hopefully all the time, because I believe that students are more likely to make meaningful learning connections if they’re engaged with the material. But I want more than that.

I want them to interact (with each other, with me, with the ideas they’re encountering), because that too makes it more likely that meaningful learning is going to take place.

I want them to participate, because if you’re actively participating in a class you’re far more likely to be thinking about what’s going on & engaging with all the ideas flying around, & making sense of them – and maybe changing some of your existing conceptions about the world. Because, after all, education should be transformative, taking you from one state of knowledge (in the broadest sense) to another.

I want them to learn a darn sight more than ‘the facts’. (I can’t think how often I’ve heard someone say, “oh that’s all very well, but if you do those things you must be missing out an awful lot of facts.”) What are the most important things we want students to gain from a paper, or a program of study? In science (at any level), one of the aims surely has to be to gain an understanding of what science is, how it’s done, & why it’s such a powerful tool for gaining an understanding of how the world works? In which case, it’s not enough to tell students about science & to fill them up with facts (many of which will probably be dropped from short-term memory storage as soon as the exam is past); we have to give them opportunities to practice doing science, & thinking like scientists, for themselves, & to fit their new knowledge & understanding into the long-term storage of their personal intellectual framework.

So how do you do this in a class of 200 or more? That’s really what I was asked to talk about - but in the light of what I’ve just said, what do you think would be my preferred approach? Yep, the seminar participants got to do the things I was advocating. A couple of examples:

In about the third lecture I’ll give in the next semester, I ask the class to consider why I think it’s important for them to know something about plants. Why are plants so important to the very existence of life on earth? Part of this includes looking at a graph which up until now (& thus failing to practice what I preach!) I’ve basically just talked about. This year I’ve decided to put it up on screen & ask the students to tell each other what it means – challenging their comprehension, giving them the opportunity to interpret & explain data presented in this particular way. So I showed it to my colleagues & said right, go to it, why are plants so important to life on earth? What’s going on in the graph? What evidence is there for your interpretation?

The graph looks a bit like this, although it has other information on it, including uptake of O2 first by marine rocks & later by terrestrial surfaces:

Well! I had to interrupt after 3-4 minutes so that we could come back as a group & discuss this. It was a good reminder for me that I needed to check that everyone in my first-year class is familiar with the conventions of how graphs are drawn & read, & for my ‘class’ of colleagues I really should have reminded myself that none were biologists & most weren’t scientists! But on the other hand, because this was completely new stuff for most in the room, they found it interesting & really got involved with working out what the graph was about & how to explain what they were seeing. Yes, this will take longer than me standing up in front of my first-years & expounding on the graph, but which approach do you think is going to result in a better-quality learning experience?

And another example to leave you with; again, what I’m trying to do with this one is to get students to look at things through a scientific lens; to ask questions, design hypotheses; consider how to test these. This time it’s from a lecture on reproduction.

When you look around the animal kingdom, you’ll find that for a great many species, individuals don’t live long beyond their prime reproductive years. Mayflies are probably an extreme example: after a mad orgy of reproductive activity that lasts only a few days at most, all the adults die. (They’re not called Ephemeroptera for nothing!) Now, in evolutionary terms this makes sense – once you’ve successfully passed your genes on, from an evolutionary perspective it doesn’t really matter too much if you’re run over by a bus the next day (or the mayfly equivalent thereof). But take a look at primates (the group of mammals that includes monkeys, the other apes, & us) & you’ll see something different. Many primates do live past their prime reproductive years.

The questions I pose – for you now, as I did for my colleagues today – are: why? What sort of selection pressures might lead to some primates living well past their reproductive years, to become grandparents? And, once you’ve made an hypothesis about this, how would you test it?