Workshop on Academic Civility - Week Two: Identifying the Challenges of Academic Civility

In the second week of the workshop, Marnie Dresser shared a presentation that asked us to consider our role in contributing to classroom civility.

The quotation that she used from Robert Boice's book Nihil Nimus: Advice for New Faculty Members indicated that "students and teachers are partners in creating" classroom in/civility.  Several of the

• What is your ideal vision of academic civility in your classroom?
• What problems have you experienced?
• In what ways may you have contributed to incivilty?
• What are your “hall of shame” stories as a student?  Professor?  What can you learn from them?
• How can we cultivate academic civility on an institutional level (as is suggested by Hassel & Lourey's article)?

Feel free to leave a response below, or to email vtlc@uwc.edu 

VTLC Reading Circle 2012 (part 3 of 7)

This post is the third in the series on the 2012 VTLC Reading Circle on How Learning Works by Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman.  There are several ways to participate, including reading and reflecting on this series of blog posts.  For more details, see our website.

The previous post asked reflective questions about students' knowledge organizations.  The third concept in the book is "Students' motivation generates, directs, and sustains what they to do learn" (69).

The authors state, "if we want our students to gain the deep understanding that comes from exploration and intellectual risk-taking (a learning goal) but they want only to do what is necessary to get a good grade (a performance goal), we may not obtain the kinds of learning behaviors and outcomes that we desire" (72).

Questions for Reflection

• What goals do you have for student learning?
• What performance (or performance-avoidance) goals do your students have?  What affective and social goals do your students have?
• In what ways are student goals aligned or misaligned with your goals for student learning? 
• What "outcome expectancies" do your students have?  How do you address these in your course?
• What strategies to "establish value" and "build positive expectancies" are you using?  Which ones would best address differences between your goals and those of your students?
• Finally, in what ways have you created a "supportive environment"?  Are there ways in which the learning context (environment) can be improved?  

Reflecting on Podcast with Dr. Bill Cerbin

Greetings VTLCers,

I hope you enjoyed listening to Drs. Nancy Chick and Bill Cerbin discuss learning styles.

Here are a few questions for your consideration:

• Dr. Cerbin mentions several misconceptions about "learning styles," ultimately concluding that "learning styles" as we often think of them, do not exist:  Do you agree?  What have you found in your own teaching and learning that supports or undermines this?  
• At about the 24-minute mark, Nancy summarized a useful response to misconceptions about learning styles as "thinking less about student's learning styles and thinking more about the ways of thinking that are required by my subject."  What kinds of thinking are required by your subject?  What are the most effective ways to teach students to think in these ways?
• Dr. Cerbin offers a few practices that enhance student learning: "free recall retrieval practice: "expressive writing" and "solution analysis."  How might you use one or all of these in your courses?
• To paraphrase Dr. Cerbin's question in the podcast, what makes your field difficult for someone who doesn't know about it? 
• What background knowledge do students need as a "framework" for your course? 

Feel free to reflect on your own or leave comments below.

VTLC Reading Circle 2012 (part 2 of 7)

This post is the second in the series on the VTLC Reading Circle on How Learning Works by Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman.  There are several ways to participate, including reading and reflecting on this series of blog posts.  For more details, see our website.

The previous post asked reflective questions about students' prior knowledge.  The second concept in the book is "How students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know."

Questions for reflection:

• What knowledge organizations do students need in order to understand your course content? 
• Around what knowledge organizations do you organize your course content, syllabus, and/or lesson plans? 
• One recommendation in the text for helping students organize their knowledge meaningfully around "deep features" of the domain is to give students problems that are already solved and explain the solutions to themselves.  This seems like a strategy that works in any discipline.  Do you employ this strategy?  What knowledge organizations does it/would it reveal to students?
• In what ways do you make the needed/optimal knowledge organizations "visible" to students in your courses?
• Which of the strategies suggested by the research do you plan to use? 

VTLC Reading Circle 2012 (part 1 of 7)

Greetings VTLCers and Scholars,

Today kicks off the reading activities for our annual common read, which is How Learning Works by Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman.  There are several ways to participate, including reading and reflecting on this series of blog posts.  For more details, see our website.

One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about this reading is the way this book addresses concepts that I think I knew (instinctively or unconciously, perhaps), but I had not necessarily thought about how to address in specific ways through curriculum, course design, in-class activities, and assessment activities.

The first concept the authors present is "Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning" (13).  Because we all work in disciplines with content knowledge, I would not be surprised if many examples of this came to mind as you read the chapter on this concept.

Below are a few questions for reflection on the first chapter and concept.  Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments (which is where I'll share my reflections as well).

• How do you gauge prior knowledge of students? What assumptions do you make about what they do or do not know when entering your courses? 
• Do you use activities to “activate prior learning” (15)?  What strategies might you recommend to your colleagues about this? 
• What examples of inaccurate prior knowledge do you encounter in your courses? To what extent are they “isolated” or “integrated” misconceptions (24)? 
• When you encounter integrated misconceptions or stereotypes, what strategies do you think best work to unseat, suppress, or replace them? 

Single-Tasking Update (Week One)

Greetings,

As I described in my previous blog post I spent this last week single-tasking with the hopes that it would improve the efficiency and quality of my work.  

I wasn't sure how to go about this, so I spent time thinking about why I was trying to navigate so many things at once.  Essentially, the answer to this question is that, like many of you, I have so many tasks that comprise my daily work (and I will leave out the 24-hour shift of parenting and second-shift of domestic labor, but they often play a role in the problems of multitasking):  

Teaching: researching, reading, prepping, teaching, assessing, conferencing

Professional Development: researching, reading, writing, revising, collaborating

Service: reading, emailing, responding, collaborating, writing, meeting, advising

The other half of this problem, though, is that I have so much "flexible" time in which to accomplish these tasks.  Other than scheduled meetings and one face-to-face class, the large majority of my time is unscheduled, and those flexible times are the ones I fill with multitasking: perhaps the solution is that I need to better schedule my time, so I don't feel a need to do everything at once.  Because I love spreadsheets' ability to categorize and organize things, the first thing I did was to make a schedule of my plan to do all of those things, with the higher-priority items coded in dark colors.  

Is that snorting and knee-slapping I hear from the blogosphere at the omission of Saturday and Sunday?  I will be the first to admit that I will be unable to prevent work from spilling over into weekends, though I hope this process will help me recover some of my weekend work time.  

Problem solved, right?  Not so fast: I was well into the task of programming all of this into my Outlook calendar when I realized I would have to stay logged into email to remind me of the shifts from task to task.  I settled for printing a few copies and tucking them into visible areas at my workplaces.  

Day 1 worked well.  And even Day 2.  But I quickly realized that problem is not just scheduling my time:  the problem is also that the time all of those tasks take is not fixed, but variable.  This first week of class, I had little "grading" to do.  In a few weeks, it will be a much larger amount.  I don't have time to adjust my schedule every week in Excel and Outlook, and even if I would take secret joy in color coding my life this way, I cannot predict with absolute certainty whether it will take me 4 or 6 hours to give feedback on a set of essays.  

So my attempt at scheduling my problem away returned me to basic general practices:

• Writing one email (or blog post or anything else) at a time.
• Logging out of email (and Facebook and Twitter) while lesson planning, reading, grading.
• Responding to email and discussion board questions at planned times, rather than all day long.

In addition, I turned off my sound notifications for email and Facebook on my smart phone.  I found I had a hard time not "checking in" every time I heard them.  

Results: 

These practices actually seemed to make a noticeable difference immediately.  Logging out and logging in at designated times helped me focus on the task at hand. I felt as though I had a very productive week, and I only worked one half-day this weekend.  I do, however, dislike the emails I feel are lingering in my Inbox for far too long (3 hours!), but I am not ready to concede that is something I can't learn to accept.  In the mean time, I'm going to continue my single-tasking mission.  And though I am loathe to abandon my spreadsheet, it will serve as a "reminder" function for when I am derailed by meetings, tidal waves of grading, toddlers with high-grade fevers, or anything else for which I cannot plan.

If you have other tips for single-tasking (or multitasking) effectively, please share away!    

UWC VTLC Podcast 2 (10/17/11): Conversation with Dr. Joe Foy

Hi, colleagues.  Welcome to the first UWC VTLC podcast of the 2011-12 academic year.    You can listen on your computer by clicking here or always on the title above, or you can subscribe via iTunes and listen there or on your MP3 player.