Assume someone offered you a million dollars to become one of the great college teachers in the world. Given that much incentive, how would you approach the challenge? Well, my plan would be to break teaching down into all of its many basic components and study each one very carefully – looking for ways to make it better. I think you build a better machine by taking it apart so that you can analyze the individual pieces and try to improve each one. However, over the years, I have never actually had anyone suggest this approach as a way of becoming a better teacher. Improvement in teaching is more often talked about in generic ways.
My thought is that you need to select one specific
component of your teaching and then focus on it for a while. How can I do this better? In fact, there have been many semesters over
my teaching career where I spent the entire time trying to improve one
particular aspect of my teaching. Then,
the next semester I would choose some other component to study.
Okay, what brought all of this to my mind?
Andy Litteral, one of my friends and colleagues
here at the Robins School of Business, gave a presentation two weeks ago describing
a couple of “faculty learning communities” with which he has been involved this
year. An informal group of faculty
members would meet periodically to discuss a general topic (use of the
case-study method, for example). They
make presentations and discuss what they had discovered in their own
explorations of the topic. They can continue to meet for an indefinite period of time until the topic had been
exhausted.
I have long argued that many schools need to create a better forum to encourage faculty to discuss the subject of teaching among themselves. Unfortunately, we often wait for an administrator to form an official committee (which can then turn into a lot of work to accomplish very little). Perhaps the faculty should do this for themselves and forget the administration.
As Andy described it, the faculty learning
community basically organizes itself (almost like a club) with the goal of
examining a topic of interest and thinking about that topic more deeply. Only people who were interested in the topic would join
but each member was expected to be an active participant. These community conversations apparently last
until everyone feels that they have accomplished whatever is possible.
To me, faculty learning communities seem
like a great idea. Obviously, such
communities do not have to be about an aspect of teaching but they certainly
can be.
After describing the workings of a faculty
learning community, Andy broke the group that was present that day into teams of 5-6
faculty members. He asked each to come
up with one potential topic to serve as a foundation for a community discussion
next fall. That by itself was a great
question – what would be a topic worth discussing? What would you like to explore with a group
of faculty members?
Being overly opinionated, I suggested that
my group discuss one of my favorite topics:
student testing. If you have
read this blog for long, you know that I always argue that “the way you test is
the way the students will learn.” In my
opinion, good testing has a very positive impact on student learning.
But what is good testing? Where do you get your questions? Should you reuse questions from year to
year? Should you give essays or problems
or multiple-choice questions or a combination? How do you test critical thinking
skills? Should you give partial
credit? Should you provide answer
sheets? Should final exams be
comprehensive? How do you handle
students who complain that the grading was unfair? What happens if a student misses a test?
To me, those questions are all vitally
important to doing our jobs well and I would love to be part of a faculty
learning community to simply focus on testing for a year. I think that alone would make me a much
better teacher.
But what other faculty learning communities could be set up around teaching? Here is where you can break teaching down into its various component parts and analyze each one so very carefully.
--Everyone says classes should be interactive but how do you get all students (and not just an extroverted few) actively engaged in class conversation?
--Preparation is a key for learning but how
do you get students to prepare before they walk into your classroom?
--How does a teacher actually go about
preparing for a class? What exactly
does that entail?
--I am an accounting teacher. How do I help my students learn to write
better?
--Schools are supposed to develop critical
thinking skills. What exactly is
critical thinking and how does a teacher develop that in a class?
--How do you teach classes of over 40
students? How do you teach online
courses?
--Educational technology is becoming more
and more prevalent. What works best and
what doesn’t work as well?
Okay, I could go on forever. But here’s the point: If you really want to get better as a
teacher, could you (yes, YOU) pick one of these topics or a similar topic and
create your own faculty learning community at your own school? I would think that if you selected any of
these topics and got a group of 3-8 interested teachers together to chat periodically and
make presentations of what they have done, the entire group would become better
teachers in a relatively short period of time.
**
**
Added
on May 4, 2013. Someone sent me an
article about a law class at the University of Virginia (http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/alumni/uvalawyer/f12/flipped.htm)
and I couldn’t help but notice the following sentences about looking at every
aspect of teaching the class in order to make each part better: "I put all my materials and my course
through an atomizer, and now I'm reassembling the bits in a whole new
way," Verkerke said. "I've drawn the guiding principles for this new
approach from research on teaching and learning, and from the insights of
cognitive psychologists. The overriding goal is to harness the power of 'doing'
to promote deeper learning for students."
No comments:
Post a Comment