Welcome to the Vanderbilt University gradSTEP blog

Join us for gradSTEP2009!

A Graduate Teaching Event for Professional Development

Held in January each year, gradSTEP is a one-day exploration on issues related to teaching, learning, and professional development across the disciplines. This year, for the first time, the Graduate Teaching Fellows at the Center for Teaching have started a gradSTEPblog. This forum is intended to help create an ongoing discussion on workshop topics prior to the event. Therefore, we would like to invite you not only to come join us in January but also to contribute to the conversation on this blog here and now by commenting on the blog posts you see here! Further details on joining the discussion can be found on the How to Use this Blog page. We also have an Open Session in which YOU can determine the topic.

Where? Buttrick Hall, VU

When? January 17th, 2009

<REGISTER HERE>

Workshop Schedule

Registration ~ 12:30pm-1:00pm

Session 1 ~ 1:00pm-2:15pm

Teaching with Clickers

[description][discussion]

Course Design for Student Learning

[description][discussion]

Fostering Critical Thinking

[description][discussion]

Learning by Discussing

[description][discussion]

The Art of Effective Presentations

[description][discussion]

Session 2 ~ 2:30pm-3:45pm

Writing a Teaching Statement

[description][discussion]

Assessment and Grading

[description][discussion]

Web-based Learning

[description][discussion]

New Online Productivity and Collaboration Tools

[description][discussion]

Open Session – Topic to be determined by YOU

[description]

Happy Hour ~ 4:00pm-5:00pm

Samples of Web 2.0 technologies

1. Wiki Software:

http://www.wikispaces.com/

http://pbwiki.com/academic.wiki

http://www.wetpaint.com/

Below  is Kevin Hadley’s example of a wiki used in Chemical Engineering:

http://www.hadleytestwiki.pbwiki.com 
 

2. Educational Wiki Sites:

http://www.wikieducator.org/Content

http://web20ineducation.wikispaces.com/ 
 

3. Blog Software:

https://www.blogger.com/start

http://www.ning.com/

http://wordpress.com/

4. Blogssamples:

http://learningfromsocialworlds.wordpress.com/

[interesting project done on 'Second Life' technology - multi-user virtual environments]

http://network.nature.com/

http://www.classroom20.com/

http://education.ning.com/

http://worldsofwordcraft.wordpress.com/

http://blogs.vanderbilt.edu/cftpodcast/

http://edwired.org/

http://msstroutscw.blogspot.com/

Other helpful  re/sources:

http://www.academiccommons.org/issue/january-2009 

The online magazine above contains articles on different aspects regarding teaching web 2.0 technologies – the issue coming in February 2009 will also focus on web technologies….

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k1985&pageid=icb.page29705

http://web20intheclassroom.blogspot.com/

 

Other interesting software:

http://voicethread.com/ 

http://technorati.com/

http://www.flickr.com/

http://moodle.org/

http://delicious.com/

http://secondlife.com/

 
Videos watched in the workshop:

Wikis in plain English
Blogs in plain English

Clickers and Student Voices

Campus Technology recently published an interview with Edna Ross, who teaches 350-student psychology courses at the University of Louisville.  I interviewed Ross for my book, and I found her to be sensitive to important social dynamics in the classroom and the ways that she can use clickers to influence those dynamics.

In the Campus Technology interview, she describes some of the ways she uses clickers in her big classes–to facilitate reading quizzes that motivate students to read their textbook before class, to check and see how well her students are following her lectures (since asking “Do you have any questions?” isn’t that productive in a class with 350 students!), and to help her students engage with course material and express their perspectives.

With clickers, you’re giving every student a voice, even the introverts, even the shy ones, and the ones who don’t agree with the dominant social position. I’m giving them a voice, and it’s heard instantly.

Check out her interview for more on her experiences using clickers.  What ideas do you have for using clickers to help give each student a voice in your classes?

–Derek Bruff

First Ever Clickers Conference

I recently attended the Inaugural Conference on Classroom Response Systems, hosted by the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Louisville.  I had a great time meeting people who I knew only by their research, and some of the sessions were very well done.

Tim Stelzer, research associate professor of physics at the University of Illinois and one of the founders of i>clicker, presented the morning keynote address.  His presentation was very engaging, featuring a nice blend of information and humor.

One point Stelzer made that stood out to me was that in the past, being highly educated was correlated strongly with remembering lots of facts.  This is still true today to some extent.  Consider Ken Jennings, the guy who won all those Jeopardy gameshows.  He’s considered highly intelligent, but not for higher-order thinking skills (problem solving, critical thinking, etc.), just for remembering lots of trivia.

Stelzer made the point that with all the information available to students via the Internet, factual recall doesn’t play the same role it used to play in learning.  The challenge now in higher education is to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills, and Stelzer feels that classroom response systems can facilitate pedagogies that help teachers meet that challenge.

Writing clicker questions that target higher-order thinking skills isn’t easy, but it’s important given the goals instructors usually have for student learning.  We’ll talk about this at our gradSTEP workshop on clickers.  Have you seen multiple-choice questions (asked via clickers or traditional exams) that effectively target higher-order thinking skills?

(For additional thoughts on Tim Stelzer’s presentation, as well as other aspects of the clickers conference, visit my blog on teaching with classroom response systems.)

–Derek Bruff

Learning by Discussing

Facilitator: Maria Ebner, Graduate Teaching Fellow

Session 1, 1:00-2:15

Register for this session here!

Effective discussions can provoke profound learning, yet they are particularly challenging to create and sustain. This workshop will pursue strategies for getting discussion going and for keeping it lively.   

Questions I would like to discuss with you include:

• How can I ask good questions? 
• How can I respond to students in a way that encourages their further discussion?
• How can I encourage students to share diverse viewpoints with both respect and candor?
• What can I do if discussion seems to fall flat or fall apart?
• What can I do about students who dominate or withdraw from discussion?

What are some ideas or suggestions you have on this topic?

Web-based Learning

Facilitator: Maria Ebner, Graduate Teaching Fellow

Session 2, 2:30-3:45  
    
Register for this session here!

Nowadays educators ask again: 

What is it like being a student today? And, how does the 21st Century affect learning? Or does it at all?  

My name is Maria Ebner, I am a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Center for Teaching, and I will be leading a session at gradSTEP in January 2009 which will focus on Web 2.0 technologies in classrooms, and their impact on teaching.

According to the YouTube video by Michael Welsch, a student today will read 2300 web pages, 1281 Facebook profiles this year, and 8 books. They will write 42 pages for class assignments this semester, and over 500 pages of email. Today’s undergraduates are “multi-taskers”, and they have to be, right?  Students of the 21st Century enter our classrooms with different experiences, expectations, and learning styles than previous generations of students.

How can we, as educators, hope to reach this increasingly diverse student body?  Many of today’s web technologies can be powerful tools for creating effective, collaborative web-based learning spaces.

And now I ask again:

What is it like to be a teacher today? How does web-based technology shape your classroom? Or should it at all?

Let me hear from you!

Assessment and Grading

Facilitator: Patrick Ahern, Graduate Teaching Fellow
 

Session 2, 2:30–3:45         

Register for this session here!  

This session will review ‘best practices’ of assessment and grading, as well as consider questions such as the following: 

How do I uncover what previous knowledge or preconceptions my students are bringing to class? 

How can I know if how I’m teaching is effective?

What are the different ways to assess the learning successes or failures throughout a semester?

How can grading teach?

When is grading a failed opportunity?

How do I use grading as a tool to clarify expectations and direction in my class?

WHAT DO YOU FIND DIFFICULT ABOUT GRADING?  HOW COULD THIS SESSION HELP YOU?

PPT online and YouTube videos??

Have you ever had to do a class project and then present it before the class?

If you have, sometimes you might have found it difficult to coordinate with all the team members and work together on the presentation.

- What if you guys could work on it online from different places?

- You could change it and then see what it looks like with the rest of the team?

- What about also including YouTube videos in your slides? Traditionally with microsoft all you can include are windows media videos… Have you ever had to switch windows between your power point and the internet browser? Don’t have to anymore…

What do you think about it?

An example of an online presentation

Fostering Critical Thinking

Facilitator: Patrick Ahern, Graduate Teaching Fellow  

Session 1, 1:00-2:15

Register for this session here! 

Fostering Critical Thinking: Many educators agree that fostering “critical thinking” is one of the primary goals of college education. But what is critical thinking? Is it a general competency or discipline-specific? What challenges might we encounter in trying to encourage it in our students?

Some topics to discuss:

How do you define critical thinking?

What might critical thinking look like in the classroom? 

What obstacles are there that prevent or impede critical thinking?

What strategies have you used to foster critical thinking in your classroom?

Have you had any successful experiences fostering critical thinking?

Perhaps most importantly, how would a discussion of fostering critical thinking be most beneficial to you? 

Please share…

Writing a Teaching Statement

Facilitator: Erin Rehel, Graduate Teaching Fellow

Session 2, 2:30-3:45

Register for this session here!

In this workshop, participants will identify core teaching values and determine how those values influence their teaching practice (current or anticipated) so that they can produce engaging teaching statements.

We will talk about questions like…

What IS a teaching statement?

and 

What purpose does it serve on the job market for you? 

Please share your comments below….

Teaching with Clickers: Engaging Students with Classroom Response Systems

Facilitator: Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

Session 1, 1:00-2:15

Register for this session here!

Classroom response systems (“clickers”) are technologies that enable teachers to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to multiple-choice (and sometimes free-response) questions during class.  These systems can be used to effectively engage and assess students, particularly in large classes.  This workshop explores questions and activities that make the most of these systems, as well as solutions to common challenges involved in teaching with clickers, including writing effective clicker questions, structuring class time using clickers, and responding to results of clicker questions.

I’m Derek Bruff, an assistant director at the CFT, and I’ll be leading the clickers workshop at gradSTEP 2009.  My book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, is coming out in February and features examples of clicker questions and activities drawn from interviews with almost 50 faculty members from a variety of disciplines.  I’ll share some of these examples in the gradSTEP workshop.

Here are a couple of resources to get you started thinking about teaching with clickers:

• I’ve written a teaching guide about clickers for the CFT Web site.
• I also maintain a bibliography of research on clickers, also on the CFT Web site.  It’s organized by discipline, so you can use it to find examples of clicker use in your field.

What questions do you have about teaching with clickers?  What examples of effective use of clickers have you seen or read about?  What potential do you see in using clickers in your teaching?  Leave your thoughts about these questions in the comments below…

Course Design for Student Learning

Facilitator: Erin Rehel, Graduate Teaching Fellow

Session 1, 1:00-2:15

Register for this session here!

This workshop will examine course design from the perspective of student learning. Workshop activities will help you determine learning goals, consider assessments to measure students’ progress toward those goals, and choose learning activities that provide students with a chance to practice the knowledge and skills you want them to gain in your course.

This session will be repeated in February, 2009 at the CFT! 

Video clip from “Donnie Darko” – what a discussion!

“I just DON’T see the point of crying over a dead rabbit!!”

Aside from Drew Barrymore’s Hollywoodesque portrayal of an obvioulsy depressed teacher of the 80s, the reaction of a frustrated student to a piece of literature – as portrayed in the video below - may even happen to the best of us. But would that be a bad thing?

I picked this clip from the movie Donnie Darko because it not only shows how Hollywood portrays a classroom discussion gone wild, but how the discussion of this scene on Youtube has evolved into an ongoing back and forth of 646 comments and counting over this particular clip. Here are some samples of the comments:

bitchinbubbles (1 month ago) I disagree with donnie’s viewpoint, it’s very close minded and based on alot of assumptions, like that we are ‘more evolved’ or ‘more important’, when these very notions are human thought processes and are perhaps less evolved that we even consider ourselves not on the same playing field as other sentient beings.

THEGOBSHITEcom (1 month ago) I too disagree: for different reasons. The author wasn’t talking about rabbits in the literal sense. He used rabbits to convey a story. You’re right, it’s very close minded. Not because rabbits could be on a different level than one perceives, having cognitive thought process, or such, but that they are just humans told through metaphoric externals and atmosphere. In any case, I think I’m an idiot for putting so much thought into what Donnie thought of a book I’ve never read. Still, great scene.

OLDSKOOLcje (1 month ago)  This movie is based on something that happened in a town close to where i live

 
Discussions are part of everyone’s life and a deeply embedded part of the online community of today’s world. How can we learn with them to lead discussions in an engaging and collaborative way in our classrooms?

Please share some of your ideas or thoughts with me on this topic below.

Click here to see all the youtube comments!

Unexpectedness, how much of it do you have?

What is the value of unexpected elements in presentations?

Watch the following video from TED.com where Dr. Jill B. Taylor makes a point about “My Stroke of Insight”.

What was your reaction?

Would you share about ideas that YOU could think of for presentations in your area of study?

What would be other elements that you think would be valueable in a presentation in order to communicate your ideas effectively?

No more boring data!

If you thought that data filled presentations could only be presented one way — boring — you are wrong.

Watch the video shown below for a new way of presenting scientific information.

Then, provide some comments on other ways you think data could be presented in interesting ways!!