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June-July, 2009

The Teaching Professor - June-July, 2009 - Full Audio MP3
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Don’t Just Tell Me; Show Me: Using Graphic Organizers Effectively
By Patty Kohler, University of Central Arkansas
Teachers tend to present new knowledge to students linguistically. We talk, they take notes; we talk, they listen; we assign, they read. Students are pretty much on their own when it comes to figuring out how to represent the new knowledge in ways meaningful to them. Research clearly indicates that brain activity is enhanced when we use and teach our students to represent information in a visual way. So how do we do that? I do it by using graphic organizers. Let me explain the rationale behind them, offer some tried-and-true examples, and identify some great sources on developing and using graphic organizers.

Rapport: Why Having It Makes a Difference
Rapport, defined as “the ability to maintain harmonious relationships based on affinity” (a definition cited in the article referenced below), is more colloquially thought of as what happens when two people “click”—they connect, interact well, and respond to each other favorably. Often it happens when two people are very much alike or have lots in common. That’s one of the reasons it isn’t always easy for professors to establish rapport with students—sometimes there’s a big age difference; others times it’s having few (if any) shared interests. However, there are good reasons for faculty to work on establishing rapport with students.

How to Get Your Students to Read What’s Assigned
By Sara Jane Coffman, Purdue University, IN
Reading is a dying art. I’d like to share nine suggestions that get students doing the reading and, more importantly, show them how and why.

Exploring ‘Bottlenecks’ to Learning
“It is a story replicated in many history classrooms during the semester. Students have once again done poorly on an assignment or exam. Their essays are the sites of massive, undifferentiated data dumps. They have paraphrased primary sources instead of analyzing them, ignored argumentation, confused past and present, and failed completely to grasp the ‘otherness’ of a different era.” (p. 1211) Although this particular story may be unique to history, a story very much like it unfolds in the classrooms of many disciplines

McGraw-Hill and Magna Publications Award for Scholarship on Teaching and Learning
We are pleased to announce the winner of the McGraw-Hill and Magna Publications Award for Scholarship on Teaching and Learning. This award was first announced in May 2008 at The Teaching Professor Conference in Orlando. A call for nominated and submitted articles, published between 2006 and the present, appeared on The Teaching Professor website.

Learning Can Be Frightening
It’s frightening when you learn that something you’ve been taught and believed for years isn’t true. That happened a lot to me in college. What I’d learned about creation just couldn’t stand up against what looked to me like a mountain of evidence. Even more frightening was a growing realization that what I had been taught about what women should do and could become just didn’t make sense. More than once I remember learning things and just resolving not to think about them.

Experience: Learning From It
In an editorial published in the Journal of Geoscience Education, a geography faculty member offers a testimonial in favor of learner-centered teaching. “Through my 15 years of teaching Earth System Science, I have explored various ways of teaching it and have become convinced that the Learner-Centered Environment, that builds upon constructivist theory principles and fosters teaching practices that recognize the active roles students must play in their learning, is particularly suitable for Earth system science education.” (p. 208)

When Peers Teach, Students Learn
Evidence that students can learn from each other continues to grow. The quality of some of the research documenting that fact is impressive. Here are highlights from a new study in which peers were used to facilitate discussion groups in a large general chemistry course.

Despite Shortcomings Popularity of RateMyProfessors.com Grows
RateMyProfessors.com is a free website where students can evaluate and post comments about courses needs no introduction to most instructors. The problems with the site are equally well known. There’s no guarantee that the students who select to evaluate and post the comments are a representative sample—and no guarantee that the assessments themselves are representative. In fact, in the Kindred and Mohammed (reference below) analysis of evaluation for 626 professors, 41.5 percent had only one rating listed.