Teaching Strategies

When Roz and I talked about how to organize this semester’s teaching class, we decided to do it a bit differently. Instead of Roz or me organizing each session and lecturing for a while, we thought we’d shift the center of the discussion to the participants.

Each session of this semester’s teaching teaching will be focused around a topic, with 3-5 folks speaking about how they achieve this work in their own classes. Hopefully this will create a good environment for discussion and the participants will be more of a learning community rather than a class of people listening to the “teacher.”

If folks are interested in doing this again, and are interested in returning to a teacher-centered model in the fall, we can certainly do that in the future. At the very least it will be nice to break things up a bit between now and then.

So, in order to make this happen, on the first day I facilitated a list making exercise. In this session we brainstormed a list of all the specific things people are interested in learning and sharing, and I took the list afterwards to see if some topics made sense to group together and how to fit it all into the semester.

Since we’re meeting Tuesdays at 9am, some people won’t be able to attend all the sessions due to BI sessions, LIB100, or evening shifts. I got a list of days people can’t attend and topics those people were most interested in so that I could make a schedule that would allow everyone to attend every session they were most interested in. Hopefully we have a schedule that works for everyone!

day 6 was a discussion of Teaching Perspectives that came out of my ACRL Intentional Teacher Immersion program from San Diego last summer. I began by discussing the two books on teaching that we had used in that program: Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield and The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. I briefly reviewed the main points of these two books. Palmer’s book focuses on the connection we make with our students rather than good teaching ‘technique.’ Brookfield’s book looks at teaching through four lenses: our autobiographies, our students eye’s, our colleagues’ experiences and theorhetical literature. I have both of these in my office if anyone is looking to read them.

Next the class looked at the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (http://teachingperspectives.com/ ) As we had all taken the inventory - we posted our placement on the continuum on the board. The five measures of the TPI are

• Transmission: Effective teaching requires a substatial commitment to the content or subject matter
• Apprenticeship: Effective teaching is a process of socializing students into new behavioral normas and ways of working. (Kolb)
• Developmental: Effective teaching must be planned and conducted ‘from the learners point of view’ (Vygotsky)
• Nurturing: Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart not the head (Albert Bandura is a researcher here)
• Social Reform: Effective teaching seeks to change society in substantive ways.

Once again we fell all along the continuums of these five factors but an interesting discussion ensued on ways our perspectives inform our teaching and our students learning.

Last week Lauren did a brief discussion of the various learning styles. We brainstormed on ones we had heard of and came up with visual, auditory, kinesthetic, verbal, etc. We had all done the Index of Learning Styles questionnaire from NCSU available at http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html

I drew up the continuums on the board and had everyone come up and mark where they fell on them. The ranges were:

• Active — Reflective;
• Sensing — Intuitive;
• Visual — Verbal;
• Sequential — Global;

Here’s how we came out on these:

I think it’s interesting to see how we cluster in some areas and spread out more in others. I think our best discussion came out of how our own learning styles can impact how we teach our material.