Active Learning in the Science Classroom

Hello and Happy Halloween!  My name is Ashley and I am a 6^th year PhD candidate in the Genetics department. I came across a great video that takes you inside an active learning classroom at the University of Minnesota and I wanted to share it with you!

http://www.youtube.com/v/lfT_hoiuY8w?autohide=1&version=3&attribution_tag=4dqkMYubkhLg3WJpy7ZprQ&autoplay=1&feature=share&showinfo=1&autohide=1

Still to this day most science classes are lecture-based and rely on transmission-of-information. This traditional way of teaching is not always effective in fostering critical thinking or scientific reasoning.  There has been a new push to reform science classroom dynamics to include active learning strategies and to engage students in the scientific process.  Concept laboratories, or active learning classrooms, as shown in this video are a wonderful example of how a science classroom can be transformed.

 

There is growing literature that shows active learning strategies in the science classroom reaches diverse students and achieves better results than lecture along.  Why then hasn’t there been a rapid movement at universities to revamp the science classroom?  It is possible that professors are unaware of data that demonstrate the effectiveness of active learning strategies.  It is also possible that professors are intimidated by the challenge of learning new techniques and the time it would take to implement these changes.  In any case, it is important that we, as the next generation of teachers, recognize this challenge and hit it head on.  

Reforming science education may not only benefit science majors, it may also help send nonscience majors into society knowing how to ask and answer scientific questions. By participating in a concept laboratory, all students will be capable of confronting issues that require analytical and scientific thinking.  In addition, as noted by several students in the video, this type of classroom environment facilitated teamwork and peer learning.  Instead of passively listening to a professor lecture, these students were working actively and collaboratively to solve problems and answer questions. Dr. Wright, the professor in the video, also noted that she is able to more easily interact with small groups of students and observe how the students use technology and discussion to come up with quality solutions to problems.

 

 

As an aspiring science professor, I hope to contribute to the reformation of science education and I challenge you all to do the same!

Using Piazza to Facilitate Peer Instruction

Peer instruction is a popular active learning technique. But how to implement it? Can it only work in small classes? How about in the sciences, where notation and jargon can really tangle things up. I'm Alp, a PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering, and this week I'm writing about Piazza, a free web-system that can help overcome these obstacles! 

Piazza is a relatively new startup founded in 2009. But what does it do? To quote from their main page:

Piazza is an online platform where students and instructors come together to learn and teach. It offers a refined Q&A environment along with key features for effective course collaboration. [...] Piazza uses the power of community to increase collaboration through wiki-style editing, endorsed posts, student-to-student learning, and instructor feedback.

The primary function of Piazza is a web forum, where students can post questions to the class. The nice thing is that the student can choose to appear anonymous to the rest of the class, while you (as the instructor) can see their real identity. Other students are encouraged to respond to see if they themselves have understood the topic well enough. 

Once a student has responded, another student may choose to edit and/or expand that answer. All changes are tracked in real time as the answer increases in length (and hopefully in depth, too)! At any given point you may choose to "endorse" a particular edit to guide the discussion in particular direction, and/or also provide your own answer which is separately highlighted as coming from you.

The best way is to play with Piazza yourself! I encourage you to visit http://piazza.com and check out some of the public classes that are being taught at schools like MIT, Stanford, and Columbia. While you may not be able to make edits, you can quickly see how the system works on a variety of different topics, ranging from Mathematics to Psychology, from Biology to Economics.

Piazza also functions as a course management system, thereby allowing you to post relevant updates, homeworks, and assignments, and also send emails out to the entire class¹. The web-system also has a statistical report interface that allows you to quickly identify commonly asked questions and topics that the class may be struggling with. Finally, it has polling functionality built right in, so you can gather feedback from your students and track how you are improving as a teacher yourself.

It is exciting to see the new and creative ways of integrating state-of-the-art technologies into higher education. I believe Piazza is a promising step in this direction and would be fun to try in the classroom. What do you think about Piazza? Do you see any shortcomings that worry you? Any features that look awesome?! Share them in the comments below!


1 Piazza even connects to current systems that you may have at your institution, such as Blackboard and Moodle! See here.

Moving Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: Transformative Aspects of Contract Grading and Pedagogy

Moving Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries:

Transformative Aspects of Contract Grading and Pedagogy

Stuart Paul Duncan

It does not surprise me that within academia, at least here at Yale and in my previous experiences that we live in a world defined, to a large extent, by fairly well set disciplinary boundaries. From my perspective, graduate students tend to respond to these boundaries in one of three ways: there are some who prefer to live closer to the liminal spaces between discrete “subjects”; there are those who like to keep more centrally located, away from such boundaries; and then there are those who like to take a leap of faith, crossing the border fully into uncharted territory.

While this may seem oversimplified, and I do admit to a radical generalization, my experience as a teacher here and at Cornell has led me to personally experience the Ivory Tower mentality with its series of entrenched and well-marked disciplinary boundaries. These boundaries are often fiercely guarded and promoted on grounds not limited to tradition, politics, and gender. My task here is not to argue the extent of such disciplinary boundaries, their level of entrenchment, or their validity—although I'm sure you can infer my position on such matters. Instead, my concern is over how such boundaries promote a content-based mentality that overwrites broader educational concerns and, more importantly, how this presents challenges for the Yale Teaching Center.

It is while reflecting on my initial experience at the YTC—both as a participant and as a facilitator—that these disciplinary boundaries come to the fore The prevailing mentality reveals an active majoring holding fast to disciplinary exclusivity; i.e., that “my” subject is special and these broader pedagogical ideas (active learning, backwards design, etc.) do not directly address issues within “my” discipline. This resistance is understandable when one considers that new graduate student teachers have been immersed in their discipline for several years of coursework, if not longer, harkening back to their undergraduate years. Such immersion serves to reinforce disciplinary exclusivity.

            There seems to be some unwritten expectation that as graduate students, we are already fully equipped to teach or lead a class. Yet, if we had wanted to teach at the pre-college level, many of us would have had to complete a teaching certificate, backed up by extensive assistant teaching, or even a master’s degree in education, before being allowed to lead a class. Perhaps at the university level, because it is assumed that we are “experts” in our field, this educational training is not necessary. I would question that, although we may be proto-experts at our fields, we are not equipped to teach beyond a “content” mentality, a mentality that reinforces disciplinary discreteness. Without prior teaching experience, or a pedagogical framework within which to shape our teaching, we become passengers in the passive act of transmitting disciplinary content, rather than active agents that enable and shape our student’s learning process.

            The YTC’s Fundamentals of Teaching courses, often not obligatory in many departments, can only scratch the surface of many of the pedagogical challenges we face as instructors. One of complex challenges faced by the YTC is aiding new graduate teachers in their transformation from a content-only subject-defined mentality—instantiated through disciplinary territoriality—to a broader pedagogical perspective. Such a perspective brings a deeper understanding of non discipline-specific pedagogy that makes us more effective teachers.

            This is not to say that there isn't value in the content of our subject areas. Broadening my knowledge of Bach’s cantatas, Beethoven’s sonatas, Wagner’s operas, and Radiohead’s fascinating metric idiosyncrasies has provided and will continue to provide a source of inspiration. Yet, as much as I enjoy teaching what I love, my most profound teaching experience came not from a successful semester of well-structured course content, but from the act of grading while teaching at Auburn Correctional Facility, an all-male maximum security prison in upstate NY.

            Grading? Seriously? How can the topic of grading provide the basis for a more profound teaching experience than the bread and butter of my training, i.e. music? What was so profound, then, you may ask? The act of grading is one of several power dynamics that separate instructor and student, and often acts as a form of a judgment. In a prison environment, those interred are ultra-sensitized to power dynamics. Being stripped of their individuality through the clothes they wear and the personal freedoms that are suppressed, inmates are constantly reminded that others hold power over them. It is with this context in mind that I was particularly sensitive that the act of grading held power over them in the same way that the guards held power—inhibiting, rather than enabling student learning.

            In order to avoid the association of grades and judgment, or perhaps more clearly, to avoid the association of grades with my assessment of the student, I decided to try a form of contract grading. Rather than setting a midterm exam, I met with each student individually during class time and went over his progress during the semester. After establishing the goals they have already achieved, we discussed what their aims were for the rest of the semester in light of my original course goals. Together, we came up with a tailor-made roadmap that took into account the needs of a course grade (reflecting the skills and goals deemed necessary for the course) and the student’s own personal goals. These goals were tiered into the traditional grading format of As, A-, B+, etc. Then after agreeing that the various grade-level goals were both fair and achievable, the student signed the contract the following week. This was the first stage in giving them an identity and control over their learning process. At the end of the course, I asked all the students to go over their contracts and grade themselves based on the contracts that they had signed. All students, except one, graded themselves exactly as I would have, to within one half-grade.

            It wasn't until after the final class that the power of contract grading hit home when one of the students said that, for the first time, he had felt like a human being. Holding back my emotions, I asked him what about the course had helped him to feel this way. He said, “everything in here is about taking away our identity. Music has helped me to find myself again, and the ability to take responsibility for my own learning has given me a power and confidence I thought I would not see before I die.” Though music no doubt played an important role as the subject content, it was the simple employment of contract grading that had a profound effect on the student, one that could have been achieved regardless of subject content.

            It is this experience that has led me to write this blog post. It is not my intention to critique the current state of academia, with its eclectic nature of subject-boundaries, but to encourage the benefits of thinking about how we teach, not what we teach, and more importantly to highlight how we want our students to leave our courses transformed. Although a maximum security prison may present an environment where there is more to gain from employing non-subject specific pedagogical approaches, all students, regardless of the function of the walls that surround them, benefit from a course primed to ask how they want their students to think differently by the end of the semester. It is in this vein that the YTC programming has the potential to enable both new and experienced instructors to move beyond the subject-specific content reinforced by disciplinary boundaries and to infuse their teaching with the hows rather than the whats.

Check out our new website!

The YTC's new website is now live!

http://teaching.yale.edu/

Graduate students and postdocs can find information on programs and workshops like the CCTP, the advanced teaching series, and the Associates in Teaching Program.  Bookmark the site today and visit often to stay up to date!

The End of the Semester

Hello, fellow teaching fellows! My name is Stacey and I am a 4th year PhD candidate in clinical psychology. For our final blog entry of the academic semester (happy Last Day of Classes, by the way!), I would like to take this moment to remind myself – and possibly you – of how to take advantage of this special time of the year as a professor-in-the-making. The exams have been written. The final papers have been assigned. Our students are frantically cramming out enjoying this blissful and carefree spring afternoon. What is a bored teaching fellow to do before the deluge of grading begins? Before you rush off to the lab or run to go complete your dissertation progress report (am I the only one still getting reminders for that?), I want to let you know that this is actually a perfect time to work on polishing your teaching dossier.

Reflecting Back for Projecting Forward

We all know that the end of the semester is the time to assess our students’ learning and acquired abilities. With any luck, you may have approached your semester from the perspective of Backward Design and built your course around carefully selected learning goals. But what about assessing your own growth and learning as an instructor? How can we evaluate ourselves and our own teaching progress?

Perhaps you have already administered your own end-of-the-semester evaluations. If you have, great! If you haven’t, it’s not too late! The free website www.surveymonkey.com is easy to use and emailing a link isn’t so hard either. These evaluations can be helpful as a summary of student reactions to the course – and to you as an instructor. Ask students to rate, rank, or somehow assess a few of the approaches you’ve used to enhance their learning. What students like isn’t as important as what's helping them learn. Sometimes they forget that. Sometimes we do too. For sample evaluation forms, see Appendix D of our Becoming Teachers handbook.

Type out a summary of your students’ comments and be careful to avoid focusing on the extremes. While one student might suggest that your sections are akin to pedagogical waterboarding, another student might want to continue attending your office hours over the summer to bask in the glow of your genius. Don’t let the hyperboles drown out the more balanced and reasonable comments. If you write up a summary, every voice will be heard and you’ll see that the polarized evaluations are far less important than the many moderate ones. Bonus hint! Make copies of all of your evaluations and keep them on file. Evaluations are often an important part of your teaching portfolio.

In addition to your students’ perspective on how the course went, take a moment to reflect on your own thoughts and feelings about the semester. Did you experiment with anything new? How did it go? Looking back, what would you do differently? What techniques did you use that were effective for student learning? Jot down your thoughts and experiences in one place... a “teaching journal” of sorts. This gives you a single place to generate ideas, troubleshoot problems, and reflect on your own successes and struggles as a budding teacher – an invaluable resource when planning future courses and creating a teaching portfolio. You might even be able to use an anecdote or two in your Teaching Statement. The experiences you reflect on now just might be the stories you will tell when you are interviewing for a job. In case you’re not convinced, or for more tips, tricks, and recommendations on keeping a teaching journal, see this gradhackerblog post.

Basking in the NOW

While you wrap your mind around the mental exercise that is looking backward and forward at the same time, give your neck a break and focus your attention and awareness on the here and now. Experience the sensations that come with the end of another semester – without regret for the past or worry for the future. Congratulate yourself for surviving another year and remember that making it to this point is a success unto itself!

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS OF 2013!

Spicing up your teaching

Hello teaching world! My name is Jen and I’m a 5^th year PhD candidate at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and also a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center. I recently co-led The Adventurous TF: Teaching with Food and would like to share the idea more widely! With this post, I'll provide some reasons why teaching with food might be a good idea and share some examples from a range of disciplines.

 

Why teach with food?

There are many reasons why college-level educators might use food in the classroom. The reference list at the end of this post provides more information about the pedagogy of teaching with food. For our purposes, I'll share three key motivations:

Learning styles

Students retain course material better when content speaks to multiple learning modalities.  Here at the YTC, we often talk about different learning styles using the acronym VARK, which signifies learning preferences (i.e. visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic). Teaching with food brings the olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses to the classroom. In short, creating a multi-sensorial approach to learning is more than just a fun classroom exercise – it deepens students’ engagement with the course material. 

Personal connection

Connecting students’ personal experiences with course content is another way to peak their interest. Everyone eats, so all of your students have some level of personal connection to food. These experiences are a great starting point for exploring a variety of complex topics: labor, globalization, nostalgia, ethnic identity, gender, family, etc. In my sections of WGSS 120: Women, Food, and Culture, I ask each student to sign up for “food sharing,” where they are asked to give a 1-2 minute presentation. Students might present on a food that is important in their hometowns (e.g. lobster in a coastal Maine town), bring in a recipe that is important to them (on paper or as a dish to share with the class), or conduct a guided tasting (e.g. a particular ethnic food or childhood favorite).

Building community

Sharing food in the classroom can be a great way to build community and lower social barriers. Some teachers, including Risa Sodi (see below), notice that when their students are engaged in the act of food preparation, their defenses are lowered and conversation flourishes. 

How to use food in the classroom?

There are three primary ways to engage with food in the classroom: as a lens to explore diverse social and cultural issues, as a topic worthy of study in its own right, and as the physical material for academic inquiry and learning (Deutsch and Miller 2012).  I'll provide an example for each.

Food as lens 

  

Risa Sodi, a senior lecturer in the Italian Language and Literature department (and the Interim Associate Director here at the Yale Teaching Center) uses food as a lens for exploring Italian culture. She projects a list of flavors: 

Chocolate
Chocolate chip
Cookies and cream
Hazelnut
Lemon
Mint chocolate chip
Neopolitan
Pistachio
Rocky Road
Strawberry
Vanilla
Vanilla cream 
 

Risa then asks her students to identify the nine most popular American ice cream flavors and the seven most popular Italian gelato flavors. At the end of the exercise, Risa asks students to share which flavors they chose and to reflect on what sort of cultural assumptions their answers reflect. (You’ll have to stop by the YTC office to get the answers…) As part of their inquiry into Italian culture, Risa’s students actually get to prepare and eat authentic Italian dishes. To delve further, she asks her students to consider key food symbols of the Italian 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (e.g. menu ingredient, cocktail, kitchen object). 

Food as subject

During a section of WGSS 120 Women, Food, and Culture on food safety, we discussed the politics of pasteurization.  Retail sale of raw milk is legal in Connecticut, so I brought in milks ranging from the ultra-high pasteurized industrially aggregated milk to the hyper-local raw milk. I had three learning goals for my students: (1) to dissect packages for information related to food production, (2) to analyze imagery related to human-nature relationships, (2) to taste differences in a food product that is often thought to be a uniform commodity.

Food as material 

At the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, food becomes the material for scientific inquiry – one of the most talked about Harvard College courses Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter a public lecture series that you can access via iTunes or YouTube. Similarly, a whole world of chemistry lessons come to life through chocolate.  

For example, if you're teaching chemistry or materials science, you might have your students read an article about the materials science of chocolate -- the tempering process is a great way to talk about the relationship between time, temperature, and the resulting crystal structure. If the course had a lab component, you might have students try 3-4 different tempering rates. They could analyze the resulting crystal structure through materials characterization techniques, but just as importantly, you could instruct them to taste the results!

I hope these examples have provoked your own thoughts about how you might teach with food. Please share your ideas by commenting on this blog post!

Additional resources

Bender, D., R. Ankeny, et al. (2011). "Eating in Class: Gastronomy, Taste, Nutrition, and Teaching Food History." Radical History Review 2011(110): 197-216.

Bonnekessen, B. (2010). "Food is Good to Teach: An Exploration of the Cultural Meanings of Food." Food, Culture & Society 13(2): 279-295.

Desjardins, M. (2004). "Teaching about Religion with Food." Teaching Theology & Religion 7(3): 153-158.

Deutsch, J. and J. Miller (2012). Teaching with Food. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. J. M. Pilcher, Oxford University Press: 191-205.

Guthman, J. (2007). "Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I am Fed Up with Michael Pollan et al." Agriculture and Human Values 24(2): 254-261.

Johnson, D. M. (2007). "Teaching Anthropology Through Food." Southern Foodways and Culture: Local Considerations and Beyond.

Long, L. M. (2001). "Nourishing the Academic Imagination: The Use of Food in Teaching the Concept of Culture." Food and Foodways 9(3-4): 235-262.