Teaching in Higher Ed

This podcast delves into the complexities of defining critical thinking, explores different theories and taxonomies, and suggests practical strategies like inverting the classroom and providing practice in ambiguous situations to enhance students' critical thinking skills.

Ken Bain discusses effective teaching methods in higher education, emphasizing asking engaging questions to spark curiosity. The importance of creating an environment for deep learning and fostering student growth through meaningful engagement is highlighted. The podcast also explores the impact of Eric Massure's transformative teaching methods and includes a discussion on typos, teaching exercises, and book recommendations.

Doug McKee talks about eliciting and using feedback from students. PODCAST NOTES Guest: Dr. Doug McKee [ CV ] [ BLOG ] WORKING OUT LOUD John Stepper’s book about Working Out Loud Studied his own teaching and determined that those who came to class and those who watched via video did equally well in the class I feel like I’m just breaking through now. I remember what it was like at the beginning. ELICITING FEEDBACK Waiting until the end of the semester to get input from our students is too late Evaluations are valuable; but it only helps you the next time you teach the class The Hawthorne Effect Formal, anonymous surveys * Customized end of semester surveys * mid-semester surveys * discussion boards https://piazza.com * in person: * talking to students after class * office hours * regular lunches with students * Reporting back about what you learned what your changing to respond http://ictevangelist.com * Department-wide early warning systems—We’re trying this this year to give students in all our classes a chance to air concerns to the department early enough so we can do something about them. RECOMMENDATIONS SpeedDial2; ultimate tab page for Google Chrome (Bonni) Piazza (Doug) Forgetmenot (Doug) Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson (Doug) Doug’s blog: teachbetter.co

Natalie Houston discusses practical productivity in academia. Podcast Notes Guest: Dr. Natalie Houston Twitter Blog ProfHacker posts Opposition to the term productivity Productivity defined Productivity, to me, is not about doing more things faster. It is about doing the things that are most important to me and creating the kind of life I want to have… To do something with ease is to bring a kind of comfort and grace to the task. It can also be more room [in your life]… Living a life with more ease… Challenges and approaches for faculty Blurring between work and non-work time Protect quality time for your most important work/projects Creating appropriate boundaries Schedule blocks of time to let Commit to avoiding digital devices before bed Establish a bedtime for ourselves Articulate an ideal weekend/Saturday Enlist partner’s support in fulfilling that ideal day The idea of a sabbath day in many spiritual traditions is to set aside a day for rest. Create transition rituals to help acknowledge the move between work and personal time Don’t force yourself to use digital tools, if analog work better; perhaps a hybrid system might work well, in some cases Todoist Email Multiple touch points Challenge with accessing email on our phones Taking breaks Set an alarm A timer is my most important productivity tool. You can use a timer in so many parts of your day. Timing a break enhances the relaxation of that break. Recommendations How to manage references with Zotero, by Catherine Pope (Bonni) IDoneThis.com (Natalie) The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, by Stephen Kotler  

Bonni and Dave Stachowiak talk about how to make your PowerPoint (or other) slides more effective. Podcast notes 2010 headlines: “US Army makes the world’s worst PowerPoint slide” “We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint.” Conflict in Afghanistan: Why developing a clear strategy was challenging. PPT in the crosshairs Edward Tufte (2006 publication) The cognitive style of ppt: There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list. Can create bad PPT on tools besides PPT Problems in higher ed In the classroom In online modules (flipped classroom) At academic conferences In the online magazine, Slate, Schuman expressed her views on just how bad it has become with PowerPoint use in education in an article called PowerPointless. She writes, “Digital slideshows are the scourge of education.” “For class today I’ll be reading the PowerPoint word for word.” –every professor, everywhere. @collegegrlhumor “College basically consist of you spending thousands of dollars for a professor to point at a PowerPoint and read the bullets.” @deliNeli “Being a college professor would be easy. Read off a PowerPoint you made 10 years ago and give online quizzes with questions you googled.” –blazik “srsly sick of all these power points. anyone can be a professor. all u need to know is how to run a power point.” @ChrisraMae17 “Y’all ever sat in a class, copied every word down of the power point, and still not kno a damn thing the professor said?” @BlkSuperMan Richard Mayer’s research shows if students w/out visuals 75% vs 89% re: bike pump PowerPoint Slide Recommendations Use PowerPoint slides for their intended purpose: to enhance your presentation, not deliver it. Put less on your slides and use relevant visuals Change your media focus at regular intervals B key Caffeine (for the Mac) Caffeine alternatives (for PC/Windows) Employ a non-linear slide structure Choose your own adventure (episode 25 re: large classes w/ Chrissy Spencer) Today’s meet (requires laptops/smart devices) Recommendations Slack (Bonni) Tapes  |  Screenflow  |  SnagIt  (Dave)

Bonni and Dave Stachowiak talk about how to capture it all, so we can have lower stress and not have things fall through the cracks. Podcast notes Guest: Dr. Dave Stachowiak What is capture? David Allen’s Getting Things Done Why capture? Other-generated capture Inboxes Have as many as necessary and no more Academics inboxes Email Phone- office line Phone-other Inbox office Inbox home Inbox bag Students after class Tools Drafts Evernote Soundever Scannable Zero inbox David Allen’s folders Self generated capture Roles Projects Tools David Allen’s templates OmniFocus RTM Post its plus Mindnode Recommendations Paprika recipe manager app (Bonni) Amazon Fresh (Dave)

On today’s episode, I talk about all that cannot be seen. Photo by Jim Frazee of Southwest Search Dogs. Used with permission (he’s my Dad).   Podcast notes Mystery commercial that I really hope someone can find and send to me Augmented reality How Stuff Works explains augmented reality Mashable’s augmented reality stories Yik yak chat service (For reasons explained in the podcast, I would rather not link to this particular app/service) [EDIT: 1/15/15/ at 10:20 am]: Right after recording this episode, I listened to episode 9 the Reply All podcast by Gimlet Media. I have even less certainty now about whether or not we should stay far away from Yik Yak, or get in there and spread some positivity and make our presence known. I welcome your thoughts either privately, or in the comments, below.   Southwest Search Dogs Online forum introductions Our perceptions really do matter Our expectations can shape outcomes in others… This American Life previewed Invisiblia on an episode called: Batman Especially the beginning re mindset on This American Life NPR Science reporters Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller explain to Ira Glass how they smuggled a rat into NPR headquarters in Washington, and ran an unscientific version of a famous experiment first done by Psychology Professor Robert Rosenthal. It showed how people’s thoughts about rats could affect their behavior. Another scientist, Carol Dweck, explains that it’s true for people too: expectations affect students, children, soldiers, in measurable ways. (6 minutes) Invisibilia Invisibilia is a series about the invisible forces that shape human behavior. The show interweaves personal stories with scientific research that will make you see your own life differently. Assume the best… and talk through the gaps… Episode 14 on Dealing with Difficult Students in Higher Ed Our diverse students Recommendation Coach.me

It is easy to want to cover up in some way as professors… In today’s episode, President Jose Antonio Bowen encourages us to become good at “Teaching Naked.” Podcast notes Guest: Dr. Jose Antonio Bowen, President, Goucher College Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning Recommendations (part 1) This episode, we start with Bonni’s recommendation and ask Dr. Bowen questions from Storycorps. Storycorps About Storycorps Storycorps’s Great questions Danny and Annie’s animated story Ask your colleagues the questions related to working from Storycorps Teaching Naked The thing that teachers do best in the classroom is to be human beings, and to get to know their students as human beings, and to make that connection between what matters to their students and what matters to them. (Jose Bowen) Start with what matters to your students Used to have the advantage, based on knowledge Use class time to make genuine connections and not simply for providing information Technology works great outside the classroom for quizzing, communication, etc. We know more about teaching than we did when we were in school Pedagogy needs to be our central focus, and most of us weren’t trained in it A teaching failure Bonni admits to one of her bigger failures in teaching in the past few years Driving the stick shift car and not always having it turn out the way we want it to Overcoming the failures – Jose gives advice We are opaque as to our own intellectual accent. Everybody has an accent in the way they speak, but they also have an accent in the way they think. Academics, in particular, are bad examples of learning, because we learned in spite of the system. We’re the odd balls. We’re the weirdos. We’re the people who liked school so much that we’re still here. Most students don’t learn that way. Failure is simply part of the game. Disconnect is just part of what happens. (Dr. Jose Bowen) Embrace mistakes Admit when things go wrong Describe why you tried what you did Model change (“I changed my mind.”) The end of the story The Naked Classroom Furniture moves around; no rows No technology / screen Index cards Noisy Laptops aren’t typically necessary Nobody uses a laptop while doing yoga or playing tennis (Jose Bowen) I believe in noisy and messy classrooms. Complexity. Lots of failures. People having to confront real problems. Confront each other. Confront me… (Jose Bowen) For beginners… need to set the stage and expectations… after that, they know how the game works. Twitter Jose on Twitter Bonni on Twitter  Michael Hyatt’s beginners’ guide to Twitter Bonni’s resources to help you learn Twitter Recommendations (part 2) Jose closes the podcast episode with his recommendations. Merlot II: Multimedia educational resource for learning and online teaching SmashFact: Create custom study apps for your students’ devices Change is hard. It’s hard for you and it’s hard for your students… Keep asking your students what’s working. Expect some failure. It’s not a linear process. That’s the process of learning and we’re all learning how to do something new: And that’s how to be better, more engaged teachers.  (Jose Bowen) Closing credits Subscribe to the weekly update and receive the Educational Technology Essentials Guide Give feedback on the podcast or ideas for future topics/guests  

There’s something wrong with the way we’re grading that isn’t being talked about nearly enough. On today’s show, Dr. Linda Nilson shares about a whole new way of thinking about assessing students’ work and making grades mean more. Podcast Notes Dr. Linda B. Nilson Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course Creating Self-Regulated Learners: Strategies to Strengthen Students’ Self-Awareness and Learning Skills Specifications Grading: Restoring rigor, motivating students, and saving faculty time Specifications grading Advocating a new way of grading from University of Pittsburgh University Times The problem with “traditional” grading Academic and Occupational Performance: A Quantitative Synthesis (Samson, Graue, Weinstein & Walberg) .155 correlation meta analysis done by Sampson 2.4% of the variance in career success 2006 study by the American Institutes for Research Fewer than 1/2 of four year college graduates Fewer than 3/4 of two year college graduates Demonstrate literary proficiency Explanation of specifications grading Bundles Virtual tokens Robert Talbert blog Casting out nines How specifications grading came to be Benefits Concerns Recommendations Bonni: PollEverywhere (new features) Linda: Cultivate your courage by trying out things you’re afraid of…

Fears and concerns over changes in higher education persist. Whether it is our disdain for lecturing to a bunch of disconnected, texting and Facebooking students, or their boredom at being put to sleep by a droning professor reading from his powerpoint, something’s got to give… In today’s episode, Dr. Cathy Davidson joins us to talk about finding the right practice, and the right tools, and being able to see what we’ve been missing in higher ed. Podcast notes Guest: Dr. Cathy Davidson Cathy on Twitter  Attention The gorilla experiment Selective attention test video by Simons and Chabris (1999) We have a capacity for learning constantly. -Cathy Davidson Patients as co-learners with their physicians in the healing process Examples of facilitation of learning, unlearning, and relearning Students write a class constitution What happens if you take responsibility for your own learning? – Cathy Davidson Alvin Toffler’s term: unlearning Alvin Toffler has said that, “…in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in ones tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn. This requires all of the other skills in this program but is perhaps the most important single skill we will teach.” …Sadly, we all find gorillas in our lives. They usually come through tragedy… We have all had those moments when there’s a before and an after in your life when the world looks different. The world was not different. What changed was your ability to see a world that you didn’t have to see when you were priviledged not to… when you thought the world only had basketball tosses in it. It wasn’t that the gorilla didn’t exist; it was that you didn’t see it. -Cathy Davidson Multitasking Fears about the calculator Debates in state legislatures and in the senate when Motorola wanted to put a radio in the car Radio actually helped save lives, especially in night driving, to combat the issue of falling asleep at the wheel Brain is constantly multitasking; we just don’t realize it Flow tasks (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) Brain surgery, playing chess, dancing to rock music, video game playing Reading a book is not considered a flow task – people go off the page in 2-3 minutes; we think we are concentrating, when we are not Unitasking Howard Rheingold on Attention Literacy There’s always something we are missing Index cards: Write down three things we’ve missed and we haven’t talked about… Tools, methods, and partners are needed to fight attention blindness Recommendations Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies Social Media Literacy article by Rheingold on Educause HASTAC is an alliance of more than 13,000 humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists and technologists working together to transform the future of learning. The Futures Initiatives on HASTAC Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely NetSmart by Howard Rheingold Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman It’s Complicated by Dana Boyd Closing Credits Subscribe to the weekly update and receive the Educational Technology Essentials Guide Give feedback on the podcast or ideas for future topics/guests