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April, 2006

The Teaching Professor - April, 2006 - Full Issue PDF
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Use the Power of Groups to Help You Teach
By Robert Loser, Northern Virginia Community College
Reading a textbook and listening to a lecture may be useful learning activities, but for most students, when used alone, they are insufficient for long-term retention and transfer of learning. Activities like group work, discussion, and other forms of collaboration have great potential for helping students process new information, ideas, and procedures so that learning is expedited.

Tell Students When They’re Wrong
Instructors need to be thoughtful and reflective about those strategies they use when they respond to students’ answers, and this is especially true when the answer given is wrong because students are easily intimidated.

Feedback Forms for Peer Assessment in Groups
Many faculty incorporate a peer-assessment component in team projects. Because faculty aren’t present when the groups interact and therefore don’t know who’s doing what in the group, they let students provide feedback on the contributions of their group-mates. In addition to giving the teacher accurate information on which to base individual grades, the process gives students the opportunity to learn the value of constructive peer feedback. It’s a skill applicable in many professional contexts.

Improve Thinking: Improve Learning
Here’s a list of some practical suggestions taken from a neat, “miniature guide for those who teach on how to improve student learning.” The guide was prepared by Richard Paul and Linda Elder, both well-known experts on critical thinking.

Why Do You Teach?
Let’s imagine a “required” professional development activity for faculty: after 20 years of teaching, all college instructors must prepare (we’ll skip the and-submit-for-credit part) an essay that explores the reasons why they teach. The idea for this assignment derives from an essay by Laura B. Soldner who found herself restive during a sabbatical year. She couldn’t seem to focus on the textbook she was supposed to be writing but kept revisiting the reasons she chose to teach and exploring how those reasons related to her current professional life.

Students and Optimistic Grade Expectations
Ask students what grade they think they’re going to get in a course before the course starts and they’ll tell you that they’re going to do extremely well. Let the course begin, distribute the syllabus, go over course requirements, give students the opportunity to attend several class sessions, and then ask them to predict their grades. Guess what? They are just as optimistic. At least that’s what one group of researchers found when they asked 258 undergraduates, most of whom had already completed one year of college.

Revising the Freshman Research Assignment
By Cara Snyder, Dallas Christian College, TX
Two years ago, I said goodbye to the traditional 10-page research paper in my freshman composition classes. My students knew too well that Googling along with cut and paste could produce 10 pages of fluff in no time, with a bibliography of 15 sources. (Who cares how reliable?) It was time for a change.

Roll the Dice and Students Participate
By Kurtis J. Swope, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD
I recently ran into a former student at a local restaurant. We talked for a few minutes about how his classes were going this semester and what his plans were following graduation. After we talked, it occurred to me that I had heard him speak more during this short conversation than he had during the entire semester he took my course. I was somewhat appalled, being that I’m an instructor who prides himself on engaging (or at least attempting to engage) students in active classroom participation. Here was a student who had done well overall in the course but who had evidently made it through my class with only a modicum of vocal participation.