"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Last night in our GRAD-602 class, we explored the question of how important is it to our “teaching” that we understand something about how people “learn”. Jeff Nugent led this class and had students at their tables first develop their beliefs about learning, and then mapped them on our wall: As Enoch Hale, Jeff and… Read more Creating Community as a Resource
Last night in GRAD-602, we had our class explore how to develop and grow knowledge about teaching within their own discipline, opening up the idea that knowledge about teaching is in fact its own unique domain. We had the class in small groups examine a series of four snapshots of teaching situations and try to… Read more The Content Pedagogy Sweet Spot
This morning, Jeffrey Nugent, Laura Gogia and I met to debrief last night’s GRAD-602 class, and decided to discuss our perspectives on teaching as a podcast. Last night in class, our students had shared their results in taking the Teaching Perspective Inventory, and the three of us had conducted that activity as well. The dominant… Read more Perspectives on Teaching
Emeril Lagasse is always suggesting that when cooking you need to “kick it up another notch!” The same could be said about online discussions. After a couple of weeks tied up in faculty search interviews and conferences, our Center for Teaching Excellence study group on Community of Inquiry got back together Thursday, and we had… Read more Kicking Discussions Up A Notch
A couple of years ago, Laura McLay had a post in her blog entitled “On Vampires and Stochastic Processes.” Nice bit of reflection on the statistical possibilities of vampires. What surprised her was the number of hits her blog had afterwards. It seems a good provocative title can draw in numbers of readers. Soooo…be interesting… Read more Serial Killers
Our team continues to explore the theoretical framework of Garrison and others known as the Community of Inquiry. As Karen Swan, Randy Garrison, and Jennifer Richardson note in “A Constructivist Approach to Online Learning: The Community of Inquiry Framework,” the CoI framework is “a process model of online learning.” Swan goes on to say that… Read more Does Inquiry Equal Learning?
Our team study group continues to meet weekly to explore the Community of Inquiry framework. As mentioned last week, we have all read Randy Garrison’s 2011 Second Edition of E-Learning in the Twenty-First Century. Garrison asserts in his book that the framework has been researched enough to be called a theoretical framework. We are still… Read more Cogitating on Cognitive Presence
According to a new infographic shared by Paul Corrigan of Southeastern University, the answer is NO. In “Grow the 8%“, Paul cites research that suggests that only a quarter of higher education professors use something other than lecture as their primary method of instruction, and only 8 percent of faculty take into account the research… Read more Does Research Inform Teaching?
In my last post, I discussed how I was rethinking some fundamentals based on our White Paper. “Rethinking” must be in vogue. Yesterday, I received my copy of a new edition of a book edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe – Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for 21st Century Learning (Routledge, 2013).… Read more Rethinking Pedagogy
Last week in GRAD-602, Jeff Nugent led an exploration on assessment. We noted that a distinction can be made between learning for mastery versus the traditional approach that typically leads to sorting and sifting students. This provided a segway to the evening’s focus on formative and summative assessment. In class, we brainstormed ways in which… Read more Roundtable Discussion on Assessment