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December, 2007

The Teaching Professor - December, 2007 - Full Audio MP3
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The Teaching Professor - December, 2007 - Full Issue PDF
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Using Media Materials to Set the Stage for Learning—A Strategy for All Disciplines
By Camille Belolan, Bloomsburg University, Pa.
Are media materials that set the stage for learning and motivate students effective only in the humanities and social sciences? Absolutely not! Educators in fields such as mathematics, nursing, computer technology, and engineering can effectively incorporate media offerings into their presentations as well. The only requirement is the will to hunt out and gather lively prose—in print ads, newspaper and magazine articles, commercials, signs, and even cereal boxes—that relates to the course concepts and to the students.

Excellent Undergraduate Education: Student Views
If students were asked for their views on excellence in undergraduate education, what might they say? The case in point here is specific to one particular major, but the model has wide applications and the findings should prompt other disciplines to explore the same question.

Students on Learning in a Major
Has anyone in your discipline ever systematically asked students to describe their learning experiences in the major? Kathleen McKinney notes that no literature or research reports on how students majoring in her field, sociology, learn the discipline—from their perspective. She decided to remedy that omission and used three different studies “to explore how sociology majors believe they learn the content and skills of [the] discipline.” (p. 112)

A Guidebook for Instructors with Multitudes
The headline of this article is the subtitle of a new book on teaching large classes, authored by a biology professor. The book covers a host of topics related to large classes, including testing, grading, managing TAs and graders, using media effectively, and devising activities to use when the classroom is an auditorium.

From the Future: A Brief History of Pedagogy
By Daniel J. Klionsky, University of Michigan klionsky@umich.edu
A bespectacled history professor sits with a small group of students. He says, “Students, you may not know this, but today marks the 100th anniversary of the brain port. Do you have any idea how students learned in the past, before people had memory chips? People haven’t always had DirectAccess ports in their heads. They used to spend a tremendous amount of time learning small pieces of information.

Cooperation and Competition
Successful professionals need to be able to both cooperate and compete. Educational experiences need to help students develop both skills. Attle and Baker, authors of an article on the subject, cite survey data from employers indicating that 80 percent of all employees in America work in teams or groups. But competition continues to be the way to succeed in the global economy.

Conceptions of Teaching: The Specifics
Since the early ’90s, researchers (mostly outside the U.S.) have been exploring different conceptions of teaching. At this point a number of different researchers, using different faculty cohorts and different methods to analyze findings, have identified a continuum of conceptions. Not all of them agree as to the points along the continuum, but they do agree about what anchors each endpoint.

Teaching Masks
That persona we don when standing before students is what Jay Parini refers to as a “teaching mask.” “What I want to suggest here is that teachers…need to invent and cultivate a voice, one that serves their personal needs as well as the material at hand, one that feels authentic. It should also take into account the nature of the students who are being addressed, their background in the subject, and their disposition as a class, which is not always easy to gauge.” (p. 58)

A Graphic Syllabus
Yes, the headline means what it says. “A graphic syllabus can be defined as a flowchart or diagram that displays the sequencing and organization of major course topics through the semester.” (p. 26) As author of a new book on this topic, Linda Nilson goes on to explain further: “Much like a concept map or mind map, [a graphic syllabus] uses spatial arrangement, connecting lines and arrows, and sometimes numbers to show the logical, temporal progression of the course through topics within the subject matter.” (p. 26)