A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This week’s post is about “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” (henceforth APTOVM), a resource that details and categorizes the many ways of presenting information visually.  I’m Damian, a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory.

Here at the Graduate Teaching Center we believe that one of the foundational skills of successful teaching is understanding how people learn and teaching accordingly.  There are several inventories that conceptualize the ways in which people learn (see Coffield, F., D. Moseley, et al. (2004) for an overview of learning-style inventories); one particular inventory that APTOVM directly speaks to is VARK.  The VARK inventory posits that information can be presented in Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, or Kinesthetic modalities, and that different people have different ways (or combinations of ways) in which they prefer to take in (or give out) information.  As teachers, then, we can strive to find modes of presentation that that best suit both the material and our students’ learning preferences

The Visual preference “includes the depiction of information in maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labeled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other devices, which instructors use to represent what could have been presented in words.  It could have been called Graphic as that better explains what it covers” (from www.vark-learn.com; visit to learn more about VARK!).  APTOVM can help us both devise ways to present information visually and concoct activities/assignments that give students the opportunity to interface with information visually.  The table groups methods into data-, information-, concept-, strategy-, metaphor-, and compound-visualization categories; it also labels whether each method depicts structure or processes, details or an overview, and divergent or convergent thinking.

While we might initially associate the visual presentation of information with quantitative fields (graphs, charts, and the like), APTOVM demonstrates how visualization methods can be applied in any class.  Some ways that I’ve used visualization methods in my own teaching have been:

• having students produce their own decision-tree algorithm of how to harmonize a simple melody
• diagramming sonata forms’ thematic-material and harmonic relationships with boxes at the blackboard

I hope you have fun exploring the table, and would love to read in the comments about the ways you use visualization methods in your own teaching!

Transformational Teaching and transforming teachers

This week’s post is about transformational teaching, a broader approach to classroom instruction that was outlined in a recent review article in Educational Psychology Review. I’m Sara, a PhD Candidate in Ancient Judaism.

"Transformational Teaching" is a term created by George M. Slavich, an assistant professor in Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, and Phil Zimbardo, a professor emeritus in Psychology at Stanford. Yes, that Phil Zimbardo.

In higher education, lecturing is still the most common form of instruction, and makes up the bulk of what goes on in the classroom. But lots of good research has shown that many students don't learn best by listening to a professor declaim information from the front of the room. 

Instead, Slavich and Zimbardo synthesize fifty years of research suggesting that many new trends in teaching - active learning, making students collaborators in the classroom, and giving learning an experiential "outside the classroom" component - are all part of a larger transformational approach to teaching. 

According to the authors, "transformational teaching involves creating dynamic relationships between teachers, students, and a shared body of knowledge to promote student learning and personal growth. From this perspective, instructors are intellectual coaches who create teams of students who collaborate with each other and with their teacher to master bodies of information. Teachers assume the traditional role of facilitating students’ acquisition of key course concepts, but do so while enhancing students’ personal development and attitudes toward learning".

Like regular teaching, transformational teaching focuses on facilitating students’ acquisition and mastery of key course concepts, and like some great teachers, it also works on enhancing students’ strategies and skills for learning and discovery. But transformational teaching might be different from what you're used to because it also promotes positive learning-related attitudes, values, and beliefs in students, such as the belief that students can learn anything and solve problems, or that obstacles are really opportunities to problem solve. It's the combination of these three educational principles that makes some teaching "transformational."

Well, that's all very nice in theory, but how does one teach transformationally? Slavich and Zimbardo identify six core methods: 

(1) establishing a shared vision for a course
This can be as simple as stating the goals for the class on the first day, focusing on backwards designed student-centric goals, or more complicated, by having the students craft a mission statement for the class together. Instructors should remind students that while, they, the teacher, are an integral part of this process, students will be called upon to set a collaborative tone, and to make sure that the goals are realized. 

(2) providing modeling and mastery experiences
Instructors both model the skills that they want students to learn (e.g. how to read an academic article critically, how to use a particular statistical model) and then give the students different opportunities to master the same skills (in small groups, out of class assignments), while inspiring students to see these problems as opportunities. 

(3) intellectually challenging and encouraging students
Instructors begin the class at a universally comprehensible level of difficulty, given the dynamics of your particular school or field,and then pose questions and assign problems that are incrementally harder, to challenge students. This challenging is done while also providing emotional and instrumental support, sensitive to students's differences and learning needs. 

(4) personalizing attention and feedback;
Using discussion section, progress reports, office hours, and Q&A periods to assess individual students' learning, and to encourage students to assess their own learning. This helps students take responsibility for their own learning, and points the teacher toward the pieces that need reinforcement, or toward new areas to explore.

(5) creating experiential lessons that transcend the boundaries of the classroom
Instructors give students assignments to be completed outside of class that draw critical connections between their lives and the subject matter. This can be as simple as asking students to interview several people of different ages about a topic to get a sense of how understandings have changed, to field trips and experiments.

And finally (6) promoting ample opportunities for preflection and reflection.
"Preflecting" on an activity or reading before actually engaging in it allows students to think about their own attitudes and knowledge of a topic, and to consider ways to approach the issue. Reflecting, which is done after the assignment or activity is over, thinks through the assumptions one had about the content or activity, and reflects on the best ways to solve a particular problem or approach an issue. These reflections can be done individually or in groups, but are not meant to get everyone to agree to a particular conclusion or worldview. 

 

So transformational teaching has input into how a course is structured, how classroom time is used, and how students' learning is assessed and pushed further. It also reimagines the teacher as the coach of a collaborative team, instead of as a performer in front of an audience.

Transformational teaching is meant for ages 2-120. But how do you think it would play out specifically in university settings? Do you have experiences succeeding or failing using some of these approaches? Have concerns about how to use it? Inspiration to share?
Talkback in the comments!

Prezi

This week’s post is about Prezi, a free, cloud-based, non-linear presentation tool. I’m Dustin, a graduate student in French, and I’ll be writing about my experience using Prezi.

Prezi’s basic workspace is its 2.5D canvas—a visual map for sharing and exploring texts, images, videos, and other presentation media. The Zooming User Interface (ZUI) allows users to navigate their canvas by panning and zooming. Users can structure their presentations with a pre-set path, but diverge from that path and explore other parts of the canvas when it might be productive. They can also forgo a pre-set path entirely and instead explore the map according to the interests of the audience. Since Prezi is cloud-based, users can access and present their Prezis from any computer with an Internet browser and Adobe Flash. They can also share and simultaneously edit their Prezis with their audience. The best part is that Prezi is free for those of us with .edu email addresses!

Prezi works great for visualizing systems, diagrams, networks, maps, data, narratives, and other complex thoughts. I used Prezi for the first time Monday in French 255/Film 259, an undergraduate seminar on French cinema. My Prezi focused on Italian Neorealism, a postwar cinematic movement influential throughout Europe, and on a prime example of Neorealism, Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Theives) (1948) in particular.

We started by looking at texts, images, and clips from Ladri di biciclette. In the screen shot above, most of the media appears to be very small, but Prezi’s zoom function allowed me to zoom into each image that the class wanted to discuss. As we panned across the map, we analyzed the texts, images, and clips, noted key stylistic characteristics, and suggested interpretations. Depending on the interests of my students, I zoomed into certain bits of media and passed over others. Once we had finished discussing the film, we zoomed out and saw how the film fit into the cinematographic movement (see below). The key Italian Neorealist directors and their films, as well as the basic characteristics of many Neorealist films helped to contextualize Ladri di biciclette. Since Prezi’s canvas is infinite, I can continue to add to it throughout the semester as my class traces the history of French and European cinema. I can also have my students add their own research to it.

Why, you might ask, should I use Prezi instead of PowerPoint? Prezi allows learners to see the big picture. Guiding concepts and relationships are represented visually, as central features of the canvas, whereas in PowerPoint they are just part of another slide. This visual/spatial representation also speaks to visual learners, who tend to learn well with maps and diagrams. Prezi also allows for a student-led classroom. Teachers can upload a bank of resources to their Prezis before class, and take cues from their students about which things they would like to discuss. Teachers can also have students upload resources to the Prezi before class to prepare for discussion. If you don’t get a chance to discuss everything, students can access the Prezi after class. Lastly, Prezi is easy to use and it’s free. Embedding Google images or YouTube videos is very simple. Printing doesn’t work well on Prezi, but teachers can save paper by giving their students a link to their Prezi instead.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself! Your students will be impressed.

http://prezi.com/explore/education/

Backward Design

This week’s post is written by Sarah. I am an almost finished PhD candidate in Geology and Geophysics.

I wanted to write a little about a concept that the GTC (and lots of other people - see some more links below) thinks is important and that we introduce in many workshops that we lead: backward design. I’ll also talk about a discussion that we had in my Fundamentals of Teaching Science workshop about backward design, where participants felt it was a little impractical.

Backward design emphasizes learning goals and outcomes as opposed to starting by deciding what topics you need to cover. Instead of first deciding what content you will teach or what activities you will do, backward design begins with figuring out what your desired results are.

Basically, you start out by deciding how you want students to be different when you’re done teaching. What do you want them to be able to do or know?

Then you decide how you’ll be able to tell if that was done. Is there a test question that would let you know? Should you have them do an experiment or demonstration to show you they know how? Should they write a paper about it?

Then you’ll decide what you as a teacher will do to help your students reach these goals. Is a lecture the best way? Should you have them go outside and observe a phenomenon? Should you assign a book or paper for them to read and discuss with other students?

Cue infographic:

(Image from Wikipedia)

After presenting this to our first Fundamentals session this fall, we were met with some skepticism. Would this really be feasible in someone’s first semester of teaching a class at a brand new job at a brand new university when they have so much other stuff to do? I suppose the official answer could be that it shouldn’t matter, you want the best for your students no matter how long it takes. But yes, it is overwhelming to think about redesigning a whole course when there is already one being taught that seems to be working fine.

That, to me, is the beauty of backward design. It is not all or nothing. This can be your framework for so many scales, from entire curricula to a semester-long course to a 50 minute class to a 10 minute activity. If there is a class that you may not have a lot of control over the whole thing (or you don’t want to change the whole thing) this is still a great way to make your activities and lessons align with your learning goals.

It was said at Teaching at Yale Day last month and many more times at GTC events – we want people to try new things even if they aren’t sure it will work. Otherwise, how do you know? I hope my skeptical workshop participants now feel a little more confident to try backwards design at least on a small scale because otherwise how will they know how cool it is?

So does starting on a small scale make it seem more doable? A devil’s advocate asked me, isn’t this just teaching to the test? What do you think?

Here are some other people talking about this:

A Chronicle article

Lots of examples and resource

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to our blog!

We are the fellows and staff of the Graduate Teaching Center (GTC) at Yale University. The GTC runs workshops and events aimed at graduate students (but open to everyone in the Yale community). This year we have decided to start up a blog and some other online content (see links to the right) so you can stay up to date on teaching news and workshop information! The blog is meant to be an informal place for us to post some teaching strategies, anecdotes, questions and answers, and whatever else we feel is important or interesting. Each week will be written by a different person to get different perspectives throughout the year

We hope it is useful, informative, and entertaining. Of course, we welcome comments and conversation from everyone!