Moore's Musings:
Let's Defend Teaching, Not Lecturing

In the last issue of eWAG, in the context of a reflection on the need to re-think the kind of learning environments and opportunities we create for students, I took a passing swipe at Mary Burgan’s article, “In Defense of Lecturing,” published in the November/December 2006 issue of Change magazine. I should probably let it go at that, but a few other related items have appeared recently and kept me stewing about the issues. In fact, the more I think about the fallacies in the argument she’s trying to make, the more annoyed I get, so I figured I’d get it off my chest and see if I felt better. Given that lecturing continues to be by far the most dominant classroom mode, certainly in higher education, it hardly needs defending. I’d like to suggest that if we’re going to defend something, let’s defend teaching, not lecturing; despite Burgan’s apparent claims to the contrary, they aren’t the same thing, and to the extent that we continue to conflate the two, we’re missing a critical opportunity to clarify what teaching really is and how essential faculty are to the teaching-learning process. [read more]

Scientific Literacy Happens...When Students Think for Themselves - Another voice from Ohio State University, Steve Rissing, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology, says "Give college students less instruction and more freedom to think for themselves in laboratory classes, and the result may be a four-fold increase in their test scores." Rissing played a major role in revamping the way the university teaches its introductory-level biology courses. [read more]

Good Stories for Good Learning Enters Third Year
Phil Venditti, Clover Park Technical College

"There is divine beauty in learning...Other have been there before me, and I walk in their footsteps...I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you."
Elie Wiesel

Everyone learns through experience--sometimes their own, and sometimes others'. From time to time we have experiences that change us dramatically, but which we never share with anyone else. At other times, we purposefully apply what we learn from our experiences to help other people grow and understand concepts and skills that they might otherwise never acquire.

All teachers tell students their own stories, and what they've learned from them, at least occassionally. Research shows that students naturally respond well to such narratives.

The "Good Storeies for Good Learning" project collects, categorizes, stores, and shares stories of people's experiences. Instructors anywhere can borrow them to help students learn.

Since 2005, with support fromthe Clover Park Technical College Foundation and the SBCTC Office of Assessment, Teaching and Learning, Phil Venditti and Sally Gove from the CPTC English Department have been gathering stories from faculty members and students throughout the Washington State Two-year college system. More than 200 educationally-valuable stories have already been audiotaped and will eventually be posted to a database and website accessible anywhere. To hear (audio mp3 files) three sample stories from Everett Community College, please click on the following links: "A Not-so-good Teacher": Terra Stoich, Student; "Making Your Own Bones": Andrea Otanez, Journalism Instructor" and " The Wrenches": Paul Marshall, Psychology Instructor.

Phil and Sally plan to attend the 2007 PNW Higher Education Teaching and Learning Conference "Creating Significant Learning Experiences" in Vancouver this May to record more stories. They hope to see (and hear) you there, sharing stories which have helped you and your students learn and grow.

Teaching Laboratories: A Professional Development Model for Faculty and Administrators
Paul Marshall, Everett Community College
Photo by Juli Boyington
Paul Marshall, Maryellen Weimer, Dean McManus
Collaborative Learning Conference, Everett Community College
February 15-16, 2007

Much faculty development practice in the professional technical and community college system is not learning-centered. We, rather, ask teachers to attend brief prearranged workshops that may or may not be linked to any deeper understanding of when and how to apply the information gathered in a workshop to their instructional needs. We do not engage and directly integrate training topic content with teaching activities. We do not work together as workforce educators to have sustained and meaningful discussion on the study of teaching and learning. Further more we rarely work together to practice these ideas in front of one another in such a way as to learn from our peers. 

Finally, we need an opportunity to practice new ideas, evaluate those ideas and revise the ideas in a safe learning environment before we take them to the formal classroom. We also need to assess the effectiveness of these newly developed skills as to their impact on our students learning.

To meet the above needs, Everett Community College has created a professional development program model for faculty called a “Teaching Laboratory”. The subject of study in the laboratory is chosen by a core group of committed and active workforce educators. A group of 15 faculty commit themselves to spend four (4) hours per month over one academic year actively engaging in the study of a chosen aspect of their teaching. The first trial of the Teaching Lab studied the use of Collaborative Learning activities in the classroom. This year’s labs (36 faculty participating) are Collaborative Learning Part II, Working with Underprepared Students and Diversity Issues in the Classroom. 

The proposed model provides a number of innovations to current faculty development practices.

• It uses local input to define the topics to be studied.
• It creates sufficient time for depth learning and application of learning in a safe environment.
• Application of best practices, assessment of those applications and refinement of the practice to accommodate local educational culture is built into the program model.
• A hidden benefit of this model is improved cross departmental collaboration.

The teaching lab model is being used to create a new model for faculty development activities which will become, if successful, the prototype for future faculty development training. The lab enables the college to bring groups of faculty together to talk about and work with their teaching skills in a new way and creates an implementation/assessment/reimplementation cycle to faculty training in a way that has not previously been used.  

"Creating Significant Learning Experiences"
Pacific Northwest Higher Education
Teaching & Learning Conference

Make plans now to submit a proposal and to register for the Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching and Learning Conference, "Creating Significant Learning Experiences". For the second year, the conference will convene at the Vancouver Hilton in Vancouver, WA; the dates are May 2-4, 2007.

A joint effort of Washington State's public higher education community, the conference provides participants opportunities to share innovative teaching and learning strategies that include best practices in face-to-face and eLearning environments, assessment/evaluation of learning outcomes, student motivation, on-campus and distance learning support services, developing and teaching blended courses, learning communities, student retention, evaluating curriculum effectiveness, etc. The planning committee strongly encourages the participation of students as presenters and have added a new thread to conference sessions that will include students and their perspectives on their learning. - (please note: registration fees for student presenters will be waived). Proposals due--February 23, 2007--are welcome in the following areas:

1. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
2. Institutional Assessment Informing Practice
3. eLearning and Instructional Technologies
4. Preparing the Underprepared
5. Students’ Experiences of Learning (a new and exciting venue for 2007 these sessions will include students as presenters in digital (video/audio) or in person

Be sure to visit the conference website for information on registration fees, lodging, the conference-at-a-glance schedule, pre-conference workshops descriptions, the conference keynoter, Dr. L. Dee Fink, and to register online.

Assessment:

Data for the Villagers: Using Survey Data for Change (National Resource Center, April 2006)
This essay by Kathleen M. Morley and Randy L. Swing is a follow-up to “It Takes a Village:  A Task Force-Based Assessment Model for the First Year of College.”  Its purpose is threefold:  first, to address the use of survey data in developing an institutional perspective on the first year of college that promotes change; second, to introduce the Foundations of Excellence surveys; and third, to illustrate how these surveys can be used in the institutional change process.  In the end, all assessment is about making improvements or confirming existing practices.  As discussed in “It Takes a Village,” data frequently have not engaged the campus in the improvement process.  This essay offers suggestions for increasing the likelihood that survey data will lead to institutional change for the first year of college. [read more ]

AAC&U Chooses 18 Colleges and Universities to Lead Initiative on Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) announced the 18 institutions chosen to participate in the Core Commitments Leadership Consortium. These schools will lead the first phase of a national initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility. The initiative seeks to embed personal and social responsibility objectives pervasively across the institution in both the curricular and co-curricular experiences as key educational outcomes for all students.

Consortium members receive a $25,000 award and have committed $25,000 in institutional matching funds over two years to provide students with purposeful and progressively challenging educational experiences leading to the targeted outcomes of the Core Commitments initiative. As part of their plans, campus leadership teams will administer a new Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory to students, faculty, student affairs administrators, and academic administrators to measure the impact of existing campus efforts. The results will be used to shape future work at each institution and across the consortium.

For more information on the initiative, please visit www.aacu.org/core_commitments.

Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility is supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Counting and Recounting: Assessment and the Quest for Accountability (from Change January/February 2007)- In "Counting and Recounting: Assessment and the Quest for Accountability," Carnegie President Lee S. Shulman argues that when various types of assessments produce results that tell different stories about a student's educational opportunities and accomplishments, no instrument can claim to be valid without a clear explanation of why that particular story is being told.

Links to Articles of Interest to Educators

Another Front on Accreditation (from Higher Ed, Jan. 17)- After months of uncertainty, the U.S. Education Department has decided to begin a process next month in which it will explore possible changes in the federal rules that govern the higher education accreditation process, department officials confirmed Wednesday. The decision, which will be formally announced in a Federal Register notice on Friday, offers yet another sign that the department plans to move aggressively, on many fronts, to carry out the recommendations of the Secretary of Education’s Commissin on the Future of Higher Education.

Higher Ed and the High Schools (from Inside Higher Ed, Jan. 23) Colleges, like factories, need to work with their “supplier community” to improve the quality of the raw materials they end up shaping, a business leader told a group of about 120 college leaders and state policy makers gathered in Washington Monday for a summit on higher education's role in improving America's high schools.

Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect - An online report produced by Carnegie and AAC&U on a three-year national project to encourage and strengthen students' ability to pursue learning in more intentional, connected ways.

Windows on Learning - In an effort to make teaching more visible by sharing new approaches and lessons in how to help all students succeed, the Carnegie Foundation has developed a gallery of websites created by faculty participating in the Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges. From the site you can a) see how other teachers create powerful learning environments b) download teaching materials to adapt and use c) find tools for studying your students' experiences as learners and d) learn how faculty can work together to improve student learning.

Conferences, Workshops, Professional Development Opportunities

"Creating Significant Learning Experiences"
Pacific Northwest Higher Education
Teaching & Learning Conference

Proposals Due:
February 23, 2007

For more conference information see article in this issue of eWAG and visit the conference website.

Quality Matters: A Workshop on Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Learning, sponsored by WSU and hosted at Spokane Falls Community College, Spokane, WA will be held on March 6, 2007 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The cost per person depends on how many people attend, but it will be somewhere between $150 and $300 per person.

The Quality Matters program has generated widespread interest and received national recognition for its peer-based approach to quality assurance and continuous improvement in online education. It created a set of review criteria based on the research literature and national standards, incorporated these criteria into an interactive web-based rubric with annotations, and developed training and a process for conducting team course reviews. The training offered will be Peer Reviewer Training.

For more information, please contact Connie Broughton, 509-434-5152.

Tracking Your Future Teachers: How the Right Database Can Help Your Program Succeed, is an interactive workshop designed to help colleges efficiently track and report student enrollment and demographics, advising notes and academic progress, mentoring and teaching placement, student activities, and other crucial information for program management and proposal writing and reporting. Bring a team of faculty, administrators and IT specialists!

May 17-18 at Green River Community College Auburn Campus. Flyer and registration information online at www.CareersinEd.org.

NADE - Developmental Education: Piecing It Together; March 21-24, 2007, Gaylore Opryland Hotel and Convention Center, Nashville, TN

CRLA 2007: A Focus on Learning;
October 21 - November 3, 2007
DoubleTree Hotel and Executive Meeitng Center, Lloyd's Center, Portland, OR

2007 Assessment Institute;
November 5-6, 2007, Westin Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana

Grants and Awards

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) offers two great summer grants through the Community College Humanities Association.  To find out about each grant, please click on:
Oaxaca: Crossroads of a Continent and
Remembering the Alamo: NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture.

Attention, Developmental Education Teachers:
Townsend Press announces its 2007 Teacher Writing Contest has begun! $40,000 in awards is available. Get details here. See 2006's winners and winning essay.

Again, we link to one of Louis Schmier's "Random Thoughts." Inspiring and thought provoking, Louis Schmier calls attention to the too often lacking but needed human dimension of education, showing that the heart of teaching is to care about each student as a unique, sacred human being. "There's Nothing to Teaching " (November 12, 2004).

This issue of eWAG features three more sites recommended by Blue Web'n an online library of Internet sites categorized by subject, grade level and format. It is hoped they may be useful in helping faculty create student-focused learning classrooms.

Google Earth
Using Google's satellite imagery-based mapping, Google Earth creates a 3D model of the entire planet that lets you grab, spin and zoom down into any place on Earth. Different versions offer tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing, and GPS device support. You can use Google Earth demos to get your students excited about geography, and use different Google Earth layers to study
economics, demographics, and transportation in specific contexts.
Requires downloading software to your hard drive.

Wikihow
wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual. With volunteer contributions, they have created a free resource that offers clear, concise solutions to the problems of everyday life. wikiHow currently contains 15,678 articles written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers. Related to eHow and the soon to be released weHow, wikiHow has a somewhat cleaner, less cluttered format. Search by keyword or browse
by subject.

Wikipedia
Since 2001 Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, has rapidly grown into the largest reference Web site on the Internet. With rare exception, Its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet simply by clicking the edit this page link. Of interest to readers is this article on Assessment. Use the search to get started or try the Wikipedia - list of basic topics or any one of the other entry points.

"If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 25 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job."

      -- Colman McCarthy in The Washington Post

Resource Materials/websites

Truda W. Banta, Editor (2007), Assessing Student Learning in the Disciplines: Assessment Update Collections, Jossey-Bass

Douglas B. Reeves (2007), The Daily Disciplines of Leadership: How to Improve Student Achievement, Staff Motivation and Personal Organization, Jossey-Bass

Barbara E. Walvoord (2004), Assessment Clearn and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments and General Education, Jossey-Bass.

George D. Kuh, Jillian Kinzie, John H. Schuh, Elizabeth J. Whitt, and Associates (2004), Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter, Jossey-Bass.