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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Rethink traditional teaching methods to improve student learning and retention in STEM Educational research has repeatedly shown that compared to traditional teacher-centered instruction, certain learner-centered methods lead to improved learning outcomes, greater development of critical high-level skills, and increased retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Teaching and Learning STEM presents a trove of practical research-based strategies for designing and teaching STEM courses at the university, community college, and high school levels. The book draws on the authors' extensive backgrounds and decades of experience in STEM education and faculty development. Its engaging and well-illustrated descriptions will equip you to implement the strategies in your courses and to deal effectively with problems (including student resistance) that might occur in the implementation. The book will help you: * Plan and conduct class sessions in which students are actively engaged, no matter how large the class is * Make good use of technology in face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses and flipped classrooms * Assess how well students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and conceptual understanding the course is designed to teach * Help students develop expert problem-solving skills and skills in communication, creative thinking, critical thinking, high-performance teamwork, and self-directed learning * Meet the learning needs of STEM students with a broad diversity of attributes and backgrounds The strategies presented in Teaching and Learning STEM don't require revolutionary time-intensive changes in your teaching, but rather a gradual integration of traditional and new methods. The result will be continual improvement in your teaching and your students' learning. More information about Teaching and Learning STEM can be found at http://educationdesignsinc.com/book including its preface, foreword, table of contents, first chapter, a reading guide, and reviews in 10 prominent STEM education journals.
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Seitenzahl: 550
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
The Authors
Dedication
Tables, Figures, and Exhibits
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction to College Teaching
1.0 Welcome to the University, There's Your Office, Good Luck
1.1 Making Learning Happen
1.2 Learner-Centered Teaching: Definition, Warning, and Reassurance
1.3 What's in This Book?
1.4 How to Use the Book
Part One: Designing Courses
Interlude. What Do They Need to Know?
Chapter 2: Learning Objectives: A Foundation of Effective Teaching
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Writing and Using Course Learning Objectives
2.2 Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
2.3 Addressing Course Prerequisites and Program Outcomes
2.4 Ideas to Take Away
2.5 Try This in Your Course
Interlude. Good Cop/Bad Cop: Embracing Contraries in Teaching
Chapter 3: Planning Courses
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Three Steps to Disaster, or, How Not to Approach Course Preparation
3.2 A Rational Approach to Course Preparation and Redesign
3.3 Choosing a Course Text or Content Delivery System
3.4 Formulating a Course Grading Policy
3.5 Writing a Syllabus
3.6 The Critical First Week
3.7 Ideas to Take Away
3.8 Try This in Your Course
Interlude. How to Write Class Session Plans (or Anything Else)
Chapter 4: Planning Class Sessions
4.0 Introduction
4.1 Avoid Common Planning Errors
4.2 What's in a Class Session Plan?
4.3 Promote Long-Term Memory Storage, Retrieval, and Transfer
4.4 Two Cornerstones of Effective Class Sessions
4.5 Plan Good Questions and Activities
4.6 Don't Turn Classes into Slide Shows and Verbal Avalanches
4.7 Use Handouts with Gaps
4.8 Planning Undergraduate Laboratory Courses
4.9 Ideas to Take Away
4.10 Try This in Your Course
Part Two: Teaching Courses
Chapter 5: Elements of Effective Instruction
5.0 Introduction
5.1 Make Class Sessions Effective
5.2 Make Pre-Class Assignments Effective
5.3 Don't Be a Slave to Your Session Plans
5.4 Keep Improving Your Teaching
5.5 Ideas to Take Away
5.6 Try This in Your Course
Interlude. Meet Your Students: Aisha and Rachel
Chapter 6: Active Learning
6.0 Introduction
6.1 What Is Active Learning?
6.2 Structures and Formats of Activities
6.3 How Well Does Active Learning Work? Why Does It Work?
6.4 Active Learning for Problem Solving
6.5 Common Active Learning Mistakes
6.6 Common Active Learning Concerns
6.7 Active Learning in Recitations and Flipped Classrooms
6.8 Ideas to Take Away
6.9 Try This in Your Course
Interlude. Is Technology a Friend or Foe of Learning?
Scenario 1
Scenario 2
Scenario 3
Chapter 7: Teaching with Technology
7.0 Introduction
7.1 Instructional Technology Tools
7.2 Learning Benefits of Technology
7.3 Setting Up Communications
7.4 Integrating Technology into Instruction
7.5 Blended Learning and Flipped Classrooms
7.6 Online Courses
7.7 Ideas to Take Away
7.8 Try This in Your Course
Interlude. Meet Your Students: Michelle, Ryan, and Alex
Chapter 8: Evaluating Knowledge, Skills, and Understanding
8.0 Introduction
8.1 Multiple-Choice and Short-Answer Questions
8.2 Evaluating and Promoting Conceptual Understanding
8.3 Evaluating Problem-Solving Skills
8.4 Evaluating Reports and Presentations
8.5 Ideas to Take Away
8.6 Try This in Your Course
Part Three: Facilitating Skill Development
Interlude. Meet Your Students: Stan and Nathan
Chapter 9: Problem-Solving Skills
9.0 Introduction
9.1 The Long, Steep Path from Novice to Expert
9.2 Strategies for Teaching Expert Problem-Solving Skills
9.3 A Structure for Complex Problem Solving
9.4 Problem-Based Learning
9.5 Ideas to Take Away
9.6 Try This in Your Course
Appendix: Steps 4 and 5 of the Waste Treatment Problem Solution
Interlude. Meet Your Students: Dave, Megan, and Roberto
Chapter 10: Professional Skills
10.0 Introduction
10.1 How Can Professional Skills Be Developed
10.2 Communication Skills
10.3 Creative Thinking Skills
10.4 Critical Thinking Skills
10.5 Self-Directed Learning Skills
10.6 Project-Based Learning
10.7 Creating a Supportive Environment for Professional Skill Development
10.8 Ideas to Take Away
10.9 Try This in Your Course
Interlude. Sermons for Grumpy Campers
Chapter 11: Teamwork Skills
11.0 Introduction
11.1 Cooperative Learning
11.2 How Should Teams Be Formed?
11.3 What Can Teams Be Asked to Do?
11.4 Turning Student Groups into High-Performance Teams
11.5 Dealing with Difficulties
11.6 Ideas to Take Away
11.7 Try This in Your Course
Chapter 12: Learner-Centered Teaching Revisited
12.0 Introduction
12.1 Aspects of Student Diversity
12.2 Inductive Teaching and Learning
12.3 Learner-Centered Teaching Strategies
12.4 Last Words
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1: Introduction to College Teaching
Figure 1.3–1 Elements of Learner-Centered Teaching
Part One: Designing Courses
Figure I-1 Graphic Organizer of Part I
Chapter 2: Learning Objectives: A Foundation of Effective Teaching
Figure 2.2–1 Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives—Cognitive Domain
Figure 2.3–1 Course Design in Outcomes-Based Education
Chapter 4: Planning Class Sessions
Figure Exhibit 4.7–1 Excerpt from a Handout with Gaps
Part Two: Teaching Courses
Figure II-1 Graphic Organizer of Part II
Chapter 6: Active Learning
Figure 6.3–1 Attentiveness versus Time in Lecture—No Activities
Figure 6.3–2 Attentiveness versus Time in Lecture—Activities Interspersed
Part Three: Facilitating Skill Development
Figure III-1 Graphic Organizer of Part III
Chapter 9: Problem-Solving Skills
Figure 9.3–1 McMaster Problem-Solving Structure
Figure 9.3–2 Definition Step of Waste Treatment Problem Solution
List of Tables
Chapter 3: Planning Courses
Table 3.3–1 Questions for Evaluating a Text or Content Delivery System
Table 3.4–1 Course Grading Policy Decisions
Table 3.6–1 Learning Students' Names
Table 3.6–2 Enhancing Communication with Students
Chapter 4: Planning Class Sessions
Table 4.1–1 Common Planning Errors and How to Avoid Them
Table 4.8–1 Skills and Learning Objectives for Instructional Laboratories
Chapter 6: Active Learning
Table 6.1–1 Active Learning Tasks
Table 6.2–1 Active Learning Structures That Address Specific Outcomes and Skills
Table 6.5–1 Six Common Active Learning Mistakes
Table 6.6–1 Five Common Concerns about Active Learning
Chapter 7: Teaching with Technology
Table 7.1–1 Instructional Technology Tools
Table 7.2–1 Applications of Instructional Technology That Promote Learning
Chapter 8: Evaluating Knowledge, Skills, and Understanding
Table Exhibit 8.4–1 Grading Checklist for Written Reports
Table Exhibit 8.4–2 Grading Rubric for Lab Reports
Table 8.4–1 Using Grading Forms to Teach Report-Writing Skills
Chapter 9: Problem-Solving Skills
Table 9.1–1 Brainwave—Expert versus Novice Problem Solving
Table 9.3–1 Questions for Reflection
Chapter 10: Professional Skills
Table 10.1–1 Activities and Assignments That Promote Professional Skill Development
Table 10.3–1 Illustrative Creative Thinking Exercises
Table 10.3–2 Illustrative Brainstorming and Brainwriting Exercises
Table 10.4–1 Illustrative Critical Thinking Exercises
Table 10.4–2 Structured Critical Reasoning
Table Exhibit 10.4–1 Grading Checklist for Critical Evaluation
Table 10.5–1 Assignments That Promote Self-Directed and Lifelong Learning
Chapter 11: Teamwork Skills
Table 11.2–1 Criteria for Team Formation
Table 11.4–1 Possible Management Roles on CL Teams
Chapter 12: Learner-Centered Teaching Revisited
Table 2–1 Inductive Teaching Methods
Table 3–1 Learner-Centered Teaching Attributes and Methods
TEACHING ANDLEARNING STEM
A PRACTICAL GUIDE
Richard M. FelderRebecca Brent
Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
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Permission is given for individual classroom teachers to reproduce the pages and illustrations for classroom use. Reproduction of these materials for an entire school system is strictly forbidden.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 9781118925812 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781118925836 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781118925829 (ePub)
Cover image: © agsandrew/iStockphoto
Cover design: Wiley
The Authors
Richard Felder, PhD , is Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, where he has been a faculty member since 1969. He is a coauthor of Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes (fourth edition, Wiley, 2015), which has been used as the introductory text by roughly 90% of all chemical engineering departments in the United States and many abroad since it first appeared in 1978, and he has authored or coauthored more than 300 papers on process engineering and STEM education. He has won numerous awards for his teaching, research, and publications, including the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education (2010, first recipient) and the American Society for Engineering Education Lifetime Achievement Award (2012, first recipient). A bibliography of Dr. Felder's papers and reprints of his columns and articles can be found at www.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching.
Rebecca Brent, EdD , is president of Education Designs, Inc., a consulting firm in Cary, North Carolina. She has more than 35 years of experience in education and specializes in STEM faculty development, precollege teacher preparation, and evaluation of educational programs at precollege and college levels, and she holds a certificate in evaluation practice from the Evaluators' Institute at George Washington University. She has authored or coauthored more than 60 papers on effective teaching and faculty development, and coordinated faculty development in the NSF-sponsored SUCCEED Coalition and new faculty orientation in the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences at North Carolina State University. Prior to entering private consulting, Dr. Brent was an associate professor of education at East Carolina University, where she won an outstanding teacher award. In 2014, she was named a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education.
Separately and together, Drs. Felder and Brent have presented more than 450 workshops on effective teaching, course design, mentoring and supporting new faculty members, and STEM faculty development on campuses throughout the United States and abroad. They co-directed the American Society for Engineering Education National Effective Teaching Institute from 1991 to 2015.
We dedicate this book to Charlotte and Wilson Brent, in loving memory of their lives well lived.
Tables, Figures, and Exhibits
Chapter 1
Figure 1.3–1 Elements of learner-centered teaching
Part One
Figure I–1 Graphic organizer of part I
Chapter 2
Table 2.1–1 Illustrative learning objectives
Table 2.1–2 Illustrative study guide 1
Table 2.1–3 Illustrative study guide 2
Figure 2.2–1 Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives— cognitive domain
Table 2.2–1 Sample learning objectives at different Bloom levels
Figure 2.3–1 Course design in outcomes-based education
Chapter 3
Table 3.3–1 Questions for evaluating a text or content delivery system
Table 3.4–1 Course grading policy decisions
Table 3.6–1 Learning students' names
Table 3.6–2 Enhancing communication with students
Chapter 4
Table 4.1–1 Common planning errors and how to avoid them
Exhibit 4.7–1 Excerpt from a handout with gaps
Table 4.8–1 Skills and learning objectives for instructional laboratories
Part Two
Figure II–1 Graphic organizer of part II
Chapter 6
Table 6.1–1 Active learning tasks
Table 6.2–1 Active learning structures that address specific outcomes and skills
Figure 6.3–1 Attentiveness versus time in lecture— no activities
Figure 6.3–2 Attentiveness versus time in lecture— activities interspersed
Table 6.5–1 Six common active learning mistakes
Table 6.6–1 Five common concerns about active learning
Chapter 7
Table 7.1–1 Instructional technology tools
Table 7.2–1 Applications of instructional technology that promote learning
Chapter 8
Exhibit 8.4–1 Grading checklist for written reports
Exhibit 8.4–2 Grading rubric for lab reports
Table 8.4–1 Using grading forms to teach report-writing skills
Part Three
Figure III–1 Graphic organizer of part III
Chapter 9
Table 9.1–1 Brainwave— expert versus novice problem solving
Figure 9.3–1 McMaster problem-solving structure
Figure 9.3–2 Definition step of waste treatment problem solution
Table 9.3–1 Questions for reflection
Chapter 10
Table 10.1–1 Activities and assignments that promote professional skill development
Table 10.3–1 Illustrative creative thinking exercises
Table 10.3–2 Illustrative brainstorming and brainwriting exercises
Table 10.4–1 Illustrative critical thinking exercises
Table 10.4–2 Structured critical reasoning
Exhibit 10.4–1 Grading checklist for critical evaluation
Table 10.5–1 Assignments that promote self-directed and lifelong learning
Chapter 11
Table 11.2–1 Criteria for team formation
Table 11.4–1 Possible management roles on CL teams
Chapter 12
Table 12.2–1 Inductive teaching methods
Table 12.3–1 Learner-centered teaching attributes and methods
Foreword
For many university professors, teaching is like being handed the keys to a car without being taught how to drive. The result? Even experienced professors can wind up driving with their pedagogical parking brakes on. They steer forward clumsily, unaware that there's an easier way, and ignoring the smoke emerging from the tailpipe.
This book is hands-down the best instruction manual for professors in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics that you can find. Husband-and-wife team Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent write in an exceptionally clear, non-stuffy voice that makes this a book you can read even at the end of a busy day. A simple glance at the table of contents or index will rapidly take you to what you might need to find at the moment—either before or after you've read the whole book.
The book is packed with special features, which include brief interlude essays that give you a sense of what your students are thinking, succinct summaries of key practical insights from neuroscience, and concrete suggestions based on solid research and decades of experience. Everything is backed with loads of references, so you can easily explore as deeply as you choose.
Books on teaching in the STEM disciplines often center on one discipline—physics, say, or engineering. Few comprehensively encompass teaching in STEM fields ranging from biology and chemistry to theoretical mathematics. This book takes a broad-ranging approach that enables readers to pluck the best insights from a wide variety of STEM disciplines.
And it's a great thing—there's never been a stronger need for a book that lays out the foundations of good teaching at university levels in the STEM disciplines. Worldwide, STEM jobs are like mushrooms—popping up at far higher rates than many other types of jobs, yet not enough candidates for these jobs are graduating from our STEM programs. In fact, often only a small percentage of high school seniors are interested in pursuing STEM careers. Many of those students fall by the wayside as they bump against the challenges of STEM studies.
But as Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent lay out in this remarkably engaging book, there are ways to work smarter as instructors—ways to help improve students' desire and ability to master tough material. This book can help you open important career opportunities for your students, even as you help improve and increase their skills that address profound national and international needs. You will also find that releasing the parking brake of less-than-adequate teaching will make your life as a professor more fulfilling and enjoyable.
Learner-centered approaches go all the way back to the Greeks, the Buddha, and various traditions of the Far East, and have recently been taken up again in the STEM disciplines by expert teachers and researchers such as mathematician Robert Lee Moore and physicists Eric Mazur and Carl Wieman. There is a reason for the continued popularity of learner-centered teaching techniques by the best and most famous teachers—such approaches do much to stimulate student success. This book contains up-to-date practical information about how to apply these techniques in the STEM disciplines.
On a personal note, I first met Rich and Rebecca at the very beginning of my teaching career and was lucky enough to attend a workshop they taught on learner-centered teaching, which is the pedagogical framework of their book. That workshop changed the whole focus of my teaching and enabled me to understand learning in a whole new, deeper way. You'll find that your own understanding of learning will be greatly enriched as you read this extraordinary book.
—Barbara Oakley, PhD, PEProfessor of Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester, MichiganVisiting Scholar, University of California, San Diego
Author of New York Times best-selling book A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel in Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra), and co-instructor of Learning How to Learn: Powerful Mental Tools to Help You Master Tough Subjects, one of the world's largest massive open online courses, for Coursera-UC San Diego.
Preface
Why another “how-to-teach” book, and why us as the authors? Our answers are in our stories.
(Rich's story) When I started my academic career in chemical engineering at NC State back in prehistoric times, I had the same training in teaching that most college professors get: none. Not knowing that there were alternatives, I fell back on the only teaching model I had, which was how my professors had taught me. Unfortunately, no one ever taught them how to teach either, and so for the first fifteen years of my career I did what all my colleagues did—gave nonstop lectures and tests that were always too long and drastically curved course grades so I wouldn't end up failing most of the class.
You could take my lecture notes to the bank. The derivations were complete and correct, my delivery was clear and occasionally entertaining, and most students left the lectures thinking they understood everything. The result was that I got high ratings and won some awards. There were just two minor hitches. After the lectures the students struggled for hours to complete assignments that involved problems similar to the ones I worked in class, and many of their exam grades were pitiful. Most who failed blamed themselves, figuring that if they couldn't do well with a teacher as clear as I was, they obviously lacked what it takes to be an engineer.
Most of them were wrong—a lot of the blame for their failure was mine. When I was developing and polishing those lecture notes—finding clear ways to express difficult concepts, coming up with good examples of every method I was teaching—I was really learning that stuff! The problem was that I was then feeding my students predigested food. They didn't have to go through the intellectual labor of working some of it out for themselves, which meant that they never really understood it, no matter how clear it may have seemed in the lectures.
Most STEM professors never read education literature, and I was no exception. It was years before I learned that excellent research has been done on alternative teaching methods, some of which have been found to promote learning much better than traditional methods do. I started trying some of those alternatives and found that they worked beautifully in my courses, and I subsequently met some pedagogical experts who helped me sharpen my understanding. One of them became my professional colleague and the coauthor of this book and my wife—Rebecca Brent. (Who says educational research doesn't pay off?)
(Rebecca's story) I've been a teacher since my earliest preschool days spent “teaching” a neighbor child her letters, and early on I made education the focus of my career. I loved learning about how people learn and creative ways to facilitate learning. I began my professional life as an elementary school teacher, and then got my doctorate and became a teacher educator at East Carolina University. It was fascinating for me to watch my students as they first began to teach and put all the education theory I had taught them into practice on a daily basis. I also worked on a faculty team to develop training programs for people in non-academic professions who wanted to change careers and become teachers. It was then that I realized that passing along a few, well-chosen techniques could go a long way toward helping people to become effective instructors. When Rich and I began to give workshops to university STEM faculty, I found that the approach held up. We could help people understand something about how their students learn, get them to think carefully about what they wanted their students to be able to do and how they could evaluate the students' ability to do it, and offer some simple ways to get students engaged in class, no matter how many of them were in the room. Some workshop attendees tried a few of our suggestions and started to see effects on their students' learning, some made major transformative changes in their courses and saw correspondingly significant impacts, and a few now give excellent teaching workshops themselves, which delights us.
In our workshops, we review teaching methods that have been proven effective by solid replicated research, most of which are relatively easy to implement. Our goal in this book is to share those methods and some of the supporting research with you.
The first chapter of the book contains a short introduction to some of what educational research has revealed about effective teaching and learning, a preview of the book's contents, and some suggestions for how to use the book. The chapter is a quick read and introduces ideas we will return to periodically in the rest of the book. Following that are chapters that deal with methods for designing and implementing effective courses and helping students acquire and improve their skills at problem solving, communications, creative and critical thinking, high-performance teamwork, and self-directed learning.
There are several things we don't intend the book to be. One is a compendium of everything anyone knows about teaching. Writing something like that would take more time than we have and reading it would take more time than you have. It's also not a scholarly treatise on the theories behind the methods we have chosen to cover. Plenty of books out there review the theories and we will point you to some of them, but our emphasis will be on nuts and bolts of the practice—what the methods are, how to implement them, and pitfalls to avoid when doing so. We'll also share findings from modern cognitive science that provide good clues about why the methods consistently work as well as they do.
The book draws extensively on journal articles we have authored or coauthored. Most notably, the interludes between chapters are almost all based on our “Random Thoughts” columns that have appeared in the quarterly journal Chemical Engineering Education since 1988. We are grateful to Managing Editor Lynn Heasley for granting us permission to modify and reprint the columns.
We have not been shy about asking for help, and so we have a long list of colleagues who previewed and critiqued chapter drafts, shared course materials, and provided invaluable encouragement. Rather than elaborating on what most of them did and making this preface longer than some of the chapters, we will simply express our deep thanks to David Brightman, Lisa Bullard, Jo-Ann Cohen, Marc Cubeta, Jackie Dietz, John Falconer, Stephanie Farrell, Elena Felder, Gary Felder, Kenny Felder, Mary Felder, Cindy Furse, Susan Geraghty, Jeff Joines, Milo Koretsky, Susan Lord, Misty Loughry, Nicki Monahan, Michael Moys, Mike Prince, Julie Sharp, Kimberly Tanner, Dan Teague, John Tolle, Thomas Wentworth, and Carl Zorowski.
We will, however, single out two individuals, without whom this book would not exist. From the moment she learned that we were planning a book more years ago than we care to contemplate, the superb author and educator Barbara Oakley functioned as our principal cheerleader, critic, and nudge, repeatedly and good-naturedly assuring us that the world desperately needed this book when we doubted ourselves, red-inking our occasionally pedantic and hyperbolic prose, and gently prodding us back into action when not much from us was showing up in her in-box. Eventually things reached a point where we had to keep pushing on—we couldn't have lived with the guilt we would have felt over disappointing Barb. Words can't begin to convey our gratitude.
And words are equally inadequate to thank our editor, Maryellen Weimer, the long-time guru of The Teaching Professor newsletter and author of Learner-Centered Teaching. Having a professional icon like Maryellen working with us was somewhat intimidating—it was as if we had set out to compose a symphony and learned that Mozart would be advising us. Fortunately, besides being one of the top authorities on higher education in the world, Maryellen is also one of the finest editors and nicest human beings. She gave us a steady stream of impeccably good advice, without ever trying to impose her views or her voice on our writing, and Rich has even forgiven her for siding with Rebecca every single time the coauthors disagreed about something.
And finally, we want to thank Kenny, Joyce, Elena, Leonicia, Gary, Rosemary, Mary, Ben, Jack, Shannon, Johnny, James, and Cecelia for putting up with our frequent disappearances in the final stages of writing this book. At the top of our very long list headed by “When we finish this &#ˆ*%& book, we will…” is “be more reliable parents and grandparents.” We hope that by the time the thirteen of you are reading this, we will have started to keep that resolution.
Richard FelderRebecca Brent
Chapter 1Introduction to College Teaching
1.0 Welcome to the University, There's Your Office, Good Luck
As everyone knows, skilled professionals routinely receive training before being certified to practice independently. Electricians, machinists, and chefs get preliminary instruction and then serve for months or years as apprentices. Accountants, psychologists, physicists, and physicians spend years earning degrees in their fields, and the physicians spend additional years in supervised internships and residencies. It would be unthinkable to allow people to practice a skilled profession without first being trained for it, especially if their mistakes could cause harm to others … unless they are college faculty members.
The standard preparation for a faculty career is taking undergraduate and graduate courses in your discipline and completing a research project on a topic someone else has defined. Once you join a faculty, your orientation may consist of nothing but the heading of this section, and perhaps a half-day or a day on such things as health and retirement benefits and the importance of laboratory safety. The unstated assumption is that if you have a degree in a subject, you must know how to teach it at the college level.
Anyone who has ever been a college student knows how bad that assumption can be. What student has never had a professor who taught at a level ridiculously above anything the students had a chance of understanding, or put entire classes to sleep by droning monotonously for 50- or 75-minute stretches with no apparent awareness that there were students in the room, or flashed PowerPoint slides at a rate no human brain could possibly keep up with?
Instructors like these unfortunately abound on college faculties. If you teach like any of them, no matter how much you know and how accurately you present it, you probably won't enjoy looking at your students' test scores or your end-of-class student ratings. Being an excellent or even just a competent teacher requires knowing many things graduate school doesn't teach, such as how to design courses and deliver them effectively; write assignments and exams that are both rigorous and fair; and deal with classroom management, advising problems, cheating, and an uncountable number of other headaches teachers routinely encounter. Figuring out all those things on your own is not trivial. Although there is something to be said for trial-and-error learning, it's not efficient—and in the case of teaching, the ones making the errors are not the ones suffering the consequences. Many new faculty members take years to learn how to teach well, and others never learn.
It doesn't have to be that way. Proven methods for teaching effectively—that is, motivating students to learn and helping them acquire the knowledge, skills, and values they will need to succeed in college and their professions—are well known. Many of those methods are not particularly hard—you can just learn what they are and then start using them. That doesn't mean they make teaching simple: teaching a course—especially for the first time—is and always will be a challenging and time-consuming task. The point is that teaching well does not have to be harder than teaching poorly. The purpose of this book is to help you learn how to teach well.
1.1 Making Learning Happen
Brainwave: What Goes on in Our Brains When We Learn?
Learning is shorthand for encoding and storing information in long-term memory, from which it can later be retrieved and used. According to a widely-used model of this process, new information comes in through the senses, is held for a fraction of a second in a sensory register, and is then either passed on to working memory or lost. Once in working memory, the information is processed, and after a fraction of a minute (or longer if the information is repeated), it is then either stored in long-term memory or lost.
The chances of a new sensory input getting into long-term memory vary dramatically from one input to another. The inputs most likely to make it relate to (1) threats to the learner's survival or well-being. In descending order, the next most likely inputs to be stored are those with (2) strong emotional associations for the learner; (3) meaning (relationship to the learner's interests, goals, prior knowledge, and past experiences); and (4) sense (comprehensibility).
It follows that if teachers present information irrelevant to anything students know and care about and it makes little sense to them, there should be no surprise if the students later act as if they never heard it. It never made it into their long-term memory, so for all practical purposes they didn't hear it. Moreover, even if information makes it into long-term memory, unless it is reinforced by rehearsal (conscious repetition), the clusters of nerve cells that collectively contain it are weakly connected and the information may not be easily retrieved.
In short, the more new information has meaning and makes sense to students, the more likely it is to be stored. Once stored, the more often the information is retrieved and rehearsed, the more effective the learning is (Sousa, 2011, Ch. 3).
Think about something you're really good at. It might be soccer, auto mechanics, chess, piano, physics, Java programming, or anything else. Go on—we'll wait.
Now think about how you got good. You might think of courses you took but you probably won't. You're much more likely to think about making your first awkward and unsuccessful efforts, getting feedback from someone else or learning from your mistakes, and trying again. If you persisted, you eventually started to succeed. The more practice and feedback you got, the better you got, until you reached your current level.
That's how people learn. Mastery of a skill comes mainly from doing things, noticing and reflecting on the results, and possibly getting feedback from someone else. If we learn anything by just reading a text or watching and listening to someone lecturing at us, it generally isn't much, and the chances of retaining it for very long are slim. The truth of that message has been recognized for a long time.
One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. (Sophocles)
What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing. (Aristotle)
You cannot teach a man anything: you can only help him to find it within himself. (Galileo)
No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. (John Dewey)
Modern cognitive science and decades of classroom research studies demonstrate that Sophocles and those other sages were right. People learn by doing and reflecting, not by watching and listening. Unfortunately, starting in about the sixth grade and continuing through college, most classes are taught primarily by lecturing. Traditional education is consequently uninspiring and ineffective for most people, and for some it becomes a serious and sometimes permanent deterrent to lifelong learning.
Fortunately, there are excellent alternatives to pure lecture-based instruction. We will describe many of them in this book, starting in the next section of this chapter. They are not traditional in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, but they have all been validated by extensive research, and many STEM instructors have discovered them and used them successfully. There's even more good news:
To teach effectively you don't have to use every teaching method known to be effective, and you shouldn't even think of trying to implement too many at once.
If you try to change how you teach too drastically, you and your students may be so uncomfortable that the class turns into a disaster, the student pushback can be overwhelming, and you'll never want to do anything new again. Instead, start with one or two relatively simple alternative methods, such as active learning, and introduce new methods gradually, never moving too far out of your comfort zone. If you take that moderate approach, your teaching and your students' learning will steadily improve, which should be your goal.
Becoming a more effective teacher doesn't require throwing out everything traditional.
We won't be telling you, for example, to abandon lecturing and make every class you teach an extravaganza of student activity. We will tell you to avoid making lecturing the only thing that happens in your class sessions. Introduce one or two activities in the first few sessions so you and the students can get used to them, and gradually increase their frequency. As you continue to use the method your confidence will rise, and your use of active learning will probably rise with it. The same thing is true for the other teaching methods we will discuss. Again, the key is to take it easy!
You're not going to win them all, and you don't have to.
Even if you use the most effective teaching methods known to education, many of your students will not get top grades and some will fail. That doesn't mean you failed as a teacher. How well students do in a course depends on much more than how their instructor teaches: it also depends on their aptitude for the subject, how interested they are in it, how hard they are willing and able to work on it, how important their course grade is to them, and an uncountable number of other factors. We suggest that your goal as a teacher should not be to have 100% of your students achieve your learning objectives, because that's generally neither possible nor even desirable. Not everyone was born to be a scientist, engineer, or mathematician, and if all of your students fully meet your objectives you may be setting the bar too low. Rather, your goal should be to enable as many as possible of your students with the required aptitude, motivation, and work ethic to succeed in your course and transfer what they learn to other courses and eventually to their careers. That you can do.
1.2 Learner-Centered Teaching: Definition, Warning, and Reassurance
The great philosopher and educator John Dewey said, “Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned” (Dewey, 1910, p. 29).
That statement may seem obvious but it isn't to everyone. If you look up the word teach in a dictionary, you will find variations of two completely different concepts:
Teach
: To show or explain something.
Teach
: To cause to know something.
By the first definition, if everything the students are supposed to learn in a course is covered in lectures and readings, then the instructor has successfully taught the course, whether or not anyone learned it. By the second definition, if students don't learn, the instructor didn't teach.
Many STEM instructors subscribe to the first definition. “My job is to cover the syllabus,” they argue. “If the students don't learn it, that's their problem, not mine.” They use teacher-centered instruction, in which the course instructor defines the course content; designs and delivers lectures; creates, administers, and marks assignments and tests; assigns course grades; and is essentially in control of everything that happens in the course except how the students react and achieve. The students mainly sit through the lectures—some occasionally asking or answering questions and most just passively observing. They absorb whatever they can, and then do their best to reproduce it in the assignments and exams. That model pretty much describes STEM higher education as it has been practiced for centuries throughout the world, despite the fact that it is incompatible with what we now know about how people actually learn.
John Dewey, whose quote began this section, clearly believed in the second definition of teaching—to cause learning to occur. That definition lies at the heart of what is now called learner-centered teaching (LCT). The teacher of a course still sets the broad parameters of instruction, making sure that the learning objectives and lessons cover all the knowledge and skills the course is supposed to address, the assessments match the objectives and are fair, and the course grades are consistent with the assessment data. The difference is that the students are no longer passive recipients and repeaters of information but take much more responsibility for their own learning. The instructor functions not as the sole source of wisdom and knowledge to them but more as a coach or guide, whose task is to help them acquire the desired knowledge and skills for themselves.
Weimer (2013, Ch. 2) surveyed the voluminous research literature on the various forms of learner-centered teaching and observed that properly implemented LCT has been found superior to teacher-centered instruction at achieving almost every conceivable learning outcome. We will use LCT as a framework for the rest of this book. In later chapters we'll discuss specific LCT techniques—what they are, what research says about them, how to implement them, what can go wrong when you use them, and how to make sure it doesn't. Before we preview the book in the next section, though, we'll warn you about something you might find troublesome when you launch into LCT for the first time. When you make students more responsible for their own learning than they have ever been, they will not all leap to their feet and embrace you with gratitude! Weimer (2013, p. 199) offers the following cautionary words:
Some faculty [members] find the arguments for learner-centered teaching very convincing. With considerable enthusiasm, they start creating new assignments, developing classroom activities, and realigning course policies. By the time they've completed the planning process, they are just plain excited about launching what feels like a whole new course. They introduce these new course features on the first day, sharing with students their conviction that these changes will make the class so much better. And what happens? Students do not respond with corresponding enthusiasm. In fact, they make it very clear that they prefer having things done as they are in most classes. Teachers leave class disheartened. The student response feels like a personal affront.
If you have not used learner-centered teaching yet, the resistance you may encounter from some students the first time you try it may be a shock to your system. You may envision your student ratings plummeting and your chances for advancement on the faculty shrinking, and it can be easy for you to say “Who needs this?” and go back to traditional lecturing.
If you find yourself in that situation, fight the temptation to retreat. Several references on learner-centered teaching methods have discussed the phenomenon of student resistance: why it's there, what forms it might take, and how instructors can deal with it (Felder, 2007, 2011a; Felder & Brent, 1996; Seidel & Tanner, 2013; Weimer, 2013, Ch. 8). We won't go into detail about it now but will explore the issue later when we get into active learning, cooperative learning, and other learner-centered methods. For now, just be aware of the possibility of student resistance to LCT, and be assured that you can minimize or eliminate it if you take the measures we'll tell you about. If your need for immediate reassurance is urgent, check out any of the five references just cited, and then relax.
You may also hear from some of your faculty colleagues that LCT doesn't work. If you do, cheerfully offer to share with them the research that proves it does (we'll provide you with plenty of it). That offer usually ends that discussion.
1.3 What's in This Book?
A graphic organizer of the book is shown in Figure 1.3–1.
Figure 1.3–1 Elements of Learner-Centered Teaching
Here are the main topics covered in the chapters.
Chapter 2
.Writing course learning objectives (statements of how the students will demonstrate their mastery of the knowledge, methods, skills, and attitudes or values the instructor plans to teach) and using them to achieve
constructive alignment
, in which the course lessons, activities, assignments, and assessments of learning all point toward the same goals.
Chapter 3
.Preparing to teach a new or redesigned course for the first time. Writing a syllabus and formulating a course grading policy. Getting the course off to a good start.
Chapter 4
.Planning individual class sessions.
Chapter 5
.Teaching effectively and continuing to improve.
Chapter 6
.Getting students actively engaged in class, no matter how large the class is.
Chapter 7
.Teaching effectively with technology. Blended learning (combining face-to-face and online instruction), flipped (inverted) classrooms, and online courses.
Chapter 8
.Evaluating how well students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and conceptual understanding specified in the course learning objectives.
Chapter 9
.Helping students develop expert problem-solving skills. Problem-based learning.
Chapter 10
.Helping students develop skills in communication, creative thinking, critical thinking, and self-directed learning. Project-based learning.
Chapter 11
.Helping students develop skills required for high-performance teamwork (time and project management, leadership, conflict management, and various interpersonal skills).
Chapter 12
.Revisiting learner-centered teaching and wrapping up.
1.4 How to Use the Book
Our goal is to describe some proven teaching methods—mostly relatively easy ones that don't require major preparation time and a few that present greater challenges—and to prepare you to implement those methods. There's one small problem, though. Let's look at a point we made earlier in this chapter:
Mastery of a skill comes mainly from doing things, noticing and reflecting on the results, and possibly getting feedback from someone else. If we learn anything by just reading a text or watching and listening to someone lecturing at us, it generally isn't much, and the chances of retaining it for very long are slim.
That's true for our students, and it's also true for you as you work to become a better teacher. If you start out intending to plow through this book from cover to cover, you'll be inundated by a flood of information coming at you faster than the human mind can absorb. You may pick up a few useful ideas but they may not lead to significant changes in your teaching, and you could easily decide to stop reading before you even get close to finishing.
Instead of reading the book like a novel, treat it more like a reference work. We have made the chapters and many individual sections in them reasonably independent, so you can jump in almost anywhere and just start reading. Here are some ideas for when and how to do it:
Take the book out at the beginning of each course you teach, look through a section you haven't read recently or at all, find a couple of new ideas to try, and try them.
Give them a fair chance to succeed—don't just do something once and decide that it didn't work, because it usually takes some repetition before teachers and students become comfortable with unfamiliar teaching strategies.
During the course, when a question, problem, or need arises, find out which part or parts of the book deal with it and check them out.
For example, if you just gave an exam and the results were terrible, go to Chapter 8 to get some ideas about what you may have done wrong, even if you haven't read what comes before it. (You may not have done anything wrong—sometimes students just don't study.)
When the course is finished, search for information about things that might not have gone as well as you would have liked.
Figure out what you want to change when you teach the course again, and put the changes in your class session plans to remind yourself to make them.
In short, read the book actively to get the most out of it.
Okay, we're ready when you are. Enjoy!
Part OneDesigning Courses
Suppose you're a professor of microbiology and your nephew is a senior in high school interested in enrolling in microbiology at a nearby university. Your sister asks you what you think of the microbiology department at that university, and you find their website and check out the department curriculum and descriptions of the courses. Your ability to evaluate the program now might be better than it was before you looked, but not much better.
A curriculum (basically, a list of course titles), catalog descriptions of the courses in it, and course syllabi are all condensed statements of what teachers are supposed to teach. After you have read them, you still know very little about what students should be able to do—define, explain, calculate, derive, model, critique, design, and so on—after passing each course (learning objectives). When instructors practice learner-centered teaching—an instructional approach defined in Chapter 1—they formulate learning objectives and use them as cornerstones of course design, delivery, and assessment. When this approach is adopted, the objectives give program evaluators, prospective students, high school guidance counselors, the program faculty members, and the students themselves a clear picture of exactly what the program is trying to achieve and what its graduates should be prepared to do.
Part I of the book outlines the basics of planning an effective course. Chapter 2 describes how to write learning objectives that address basic knowledge and high-level thinking, problem-solving, and important nontechnical professional skills. Chapter 3 suggests ways to minimize the massive time and effort usually required by a new course preparation or major course redesign and to get off to a good start in the first week, and Chapter 4 discusses how to plan what you will do in the rest of the course. The graphic organizer in Figure I-1 provides an overview of the structure of this set of chapters.
Figure I-1 Graphic Organizer of Part I
Interlude. What Do They Need to Know?
Interviewer:
Senior:
I:
S:
I:
S:
I:
S:
I:
S:
I:
S:
I:
This hypothetical interview is not all that hypothetical. The job market in technical disciplines—especially in developed countries—is changing, and future graduates will need skills beyond the ones that used to be sufficient. An implication for STEM education is that a lot of what we're teaching is the wrong material. Since the 1960s, we have concentrated almost exclusively on equipping students with analytical problem-solving skills. In recent years a significant number of business and industry spokespersons (see, for example, Prichard 2013) argue that most jobs calling for those skills can now be done better and cheaper by either computers or skilled workers in developing countries—and if they can be, they will be. They also predict that STEM graduates with certain different skills will continue to find jobs in developed countries:
Creative researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs who can help their companies stay ahead of the technology development curve
Holistic, multidisciplinary thinkers who can recognize opportunities in the global economy and formulate strategies to capitalize on them
People with strong communication, management, and teamwork skills who can establish and maintain good relationships with coworkers, clients, and potential clients
People with the language skills and cultural awareness needed to build bridges between companies in developing nations, where many manufacturing facilities and jobs are migrating, and developed nations, where many customers and consumers will continue to be located
The question is, are we helping STEM students develop those increasingly important attributes? In relatively few cases—mostly small colleges with strong liberal arts programs that emphasize project-based learning (Prichard, 2013) and some individual STEM departments—the answer is “yes,” but in an overwhelming majority of STEM programs, it is “not really.” We still spend most of our time and effort teaching our students to “derive an expression relating A to B” and “given X and Y, calculate Z,” but we rarely provide systematic training in the abilities that future graduates will need to get and hold jobs. Why don't we? Because people as a rule are reluctant to leave their comfort zones, and faculty members are no exception. Most of us can solve equations in our sleep and feel comfortable teaching students to do it, but we're not so sure about our ability to tackle multidisciplinary problems that require creativity and critical thinking, let alone our ability to teach anyone else to do it.
An effective first step in teaching high-level thinking and problem-solving is to formulate learning objectives, statements that define targeted knowledge and skills in a way that is clear to instructors and students. How to do that for basic knowledge and high-level skills is the primary subject of Chapter 2. How to then teach the students to meet those objectives is the subject of the rest of the book.
Chapter 2Learning ObjectivesA Foundation of Effective Teaching
2.0 Introduction
Here are two dialogues you can hear variants of every day on every campus. Let's first eavesdrop in the student lounge, where several students are talking about their upcoming physics exam.
George:
Ming-Hua:
Kelly:
George:
Now let's step across the hall to the faculty lounge and hear what some of those students' instructors have to say.
Professor Harwood:
Professor Buffo:
Professor Harwood:
Professor Kreplach:
