Resources

The notion that learning is not an outcome of teaching is a challenging conundrum to those who teach. Perhaps for two reasons, first, it’s counter intuitive, and second, it begs the question, “Well then what am I teaching for if not to bring about learning?!” While teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin, the reality is that it is possible that what learners actually learn in a given lesson or course has little connection to what the teacher does or is trying to teach. We can imagine that some of this has to do with poor teaching. But some of it has to do with other complex dynamics of learning, including motivation, confirmation bias, attentional states, and capacities. A teacher who does not understand principles of learning, neglects to prepare well-designed learning outcomes, fails to ensure student engagement, and fails to apply sound instructional practices will likely not bring about meaningful learning. But the concept that “learning is not an outcome of teaching” goes deeper than that. The idea has to do with the fact that learners need to be, and are, active participants in their own learning. Regardless of our particular educational intent as teachers, students bring to the learning experience their own expectations, felt needs, goals, assumptions, frames of reference, and limitations related to the learning experience. Those factors often are more determinative of what will actually be learned than will anything the teacher intends or works toward. Experienced congregational ministers are familiar with this phenomenon. Regardless of how well they craft a sermon and despite how intentional they are in being clear about the purpose, function, and objective of the sermon, the fact is that the “real” sermon is the one that is heard by each parishioner in the pew and not the one preached from the pulpit. The preacher may be preaching the one sermon he or she prepared for Sunday, but there will be as many sermons heard as there are people in the sanctuary. This phenomenon always makes for interesting conversations at the door as the pastor greets the parishioners. If five people comment on the sermon on their way out, the preacher will be left wondering how and when it was that they heard those five different things in the sermon! The concept that learning is not an outcome of teaching can challenge certain educational approaches, like “teaching by telling,” lecturing, or an exclusive diet of direct instruction. If learners are active agents in their own learning, then we need to use those educational approaches that tap into what students bring to the learning experience. Ways to Ensure Better Outcomes The best way to ensure better learning outcomes is to design for student engagement. • Facilitate ways for students to discover their own learning and insights • Allow students to negotiate their own learning goals and facilitate ways for them to achieve them • Focus on problem-posing (which requires data gathering, observation, analysis, and interpretation) as well as problem-solving • Cultivate student's capacity for learning how to ask questions rather than getting good at answering teacher’s questions • Facilitate ways for students to construct their knowledge rather than providing them with information • Help students articulate their prejudices and bias • Help students uncover and identify their misunderstandings • Help students identify their resistance to new ideas • Allow students the options of approaching learning in the ways (modalities) they need. • Ensure that students apply knowledge to demonstrate learning, including through non-academic venues.

This is a substantially expanded and enhanced revision of Phyllis Blumberg’s acclaimed and bestselling book, Developing Learner-Centered Teaching: A Practical Guide for Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2009). This easy to follow how-to-guide provides faculty with both a thorough introduction to this evidence-based approach to teaching and practical guidance on how to progressively implement it to strengthen the impact of their teaching. It demonstrates how they can integrate learning-centered teaching into their classroom practice without sacrificing content and rigor, and how to positively engage students in the process by demonstrating its impact on their mastery and recall of key concepts and knowledge. An added outcome, given that learning-centered teaching is correlated with improved student learning, is the resulting assessment data that it provides faculty with the measures to meet the increased demands by accreditors, legislators and society for evidence of improved teaching and learning outcomes. Phyllis Blumberg demonstrates how to use rubrics to not only satisfy outside requirements and accreditation self-studies but, more importantly, for faculty to use for the purposes of self-improvement or their teaching portfolios. She provides examples of how the rubrics can be used to ascertain whether college-wide strategic plans for teaching excellence are being met, for program review, and to determine the effectiveness of faculty development efforts. The book includes the following features: - Boxes with easy-to-implement and adaptable examples, covering applications across disciplines and course types - Worksheets that foster easy implementation of concepts Rubrics for self- assessment and peer assessment of learning-centered teaching - Detailed directions on how to use the rubrics as a teaching assessment tool for individuals, courses, and programs - List of examples of use classified by discipline and type of course Phyllis Blumberg offers Making Learning Centered Teaching Course Design Institutes and workshops on this and other teaching and assessment topics. Half day to multiple day modules. (From the Publisher)

What does it mean to be a productive professor in higher education? What would it feel like to have more peace and productivity? To have nothing fall through the cracks? The Productive Online and Offline Professor is written for today’s busy higher education professional. Through an exploration of what it means to make work meaningful, this book offers practical strategies and tips to support higher education professionals in efficiently managing and effectively using a wide range of technologies and productivity tools. Higher education instructors will find this guide helps them to fulfill their teaching roles with excellence and to build engaging relationships with students while also successfully managing other priorities in their professional and personal lives. The Productive Online Professor assists those who teach online and blended courses with managing their personal productivity. Faculty are often expected to provide support and feedback to learners outside of normal work hours in non-traditional classes. Programs that are designed with more asynchronous content may cause faculty to perceive that it is difficult to ever press the “off button” on their teaching.The author offers guidance and suggests software tools for streamlining communication and productivity that enable faculty to better balance their lives while giving rich feedback to students. Part 1 addresses the challenges in defining productivity and presents a working definition for the text. Part 2 describes the ability to communicate using both synchronous and asynchronous methods, along with ways of enriching such communication. Part 3 describes methods for finding, curating, and sharing relevant knowledge both within one’s courses and to a broader personal learning network (PLN). Part 4 examines specific tools for navigating the unique challenges of productivity while teaching online. It includes ways to grade more productively while still providing rich feedback to students. Part 5 shares techniques for keeping one’s course materials current and relevant in the most efficient ways possible. The Productive Online Professor is a practical guide for how to provide high quality online classes to diverse students. This book shares specific technology and other tools that may be used in charting a course toward greater productivity. It is intended to be a professional resource for fulfilling our roles with excellence and joy, while managing other priorities in our personal and professional lives.(From the Publisher)

As a professor, I am caught in the midst of a revolutionary period in education and technology. Education has had a slow building relationship with technology and has even had a love-hate relationship with the use of social media, despite its impenetrable growing prevalence in our lives. For younger generations, social media has gone from phenomenon to cultural norm, and the debate regarding whether or not to integrate social media into the classroom becomes more relevant. Social media is a pandora’s box of opportune connection, knowledge and dangerous pitfall. Though you can live without it, living with it in the digital age puts you among the same pace with the rest of the world. It holds everything that the modern world relies on for information, culture, entertainment and social activity. Aside from the obvious risks of using social media, like distractions and negative digital spaces, I have always been a vocal advocate for using social media in the classroom. As classrooms are going more digital and even more online courses are being taught, I believe that social media becoming a necessary tool to enhance student engagement, teaching methodology and learning development. I can share social media news that is relevant to the class materials or have students find relevant materials from social media which are pertinent to the content of the class. This can be done intentionally in the classroom, but unintentionally, it occurs rather frequently. This is due to the fact that students are already on social media and are sharing, following and seeking information which may help them in their studies. Social media is used by students for their assignments, for support, and for information. Since the students are already on social media, at times it is important to meet them where they are. We only have to look briefly at the major paradigm shift in education as a whole. Social media and technology have become the primary tool for personal education in the past decade, yet when you examine the educational and academic landscape, the archetypical classroom setting with a student listening to the teacher’s lecture has not changed all that much. The conventional antics in education are as always, a far step behind. Students now are gravitating towards learning digitally, where the preference to engage in information and material at an autonomous pace and in a self-directed manner becomes a greater expectation. Younger generations have grown up learning in such a manner, and its elevated efficiency leads me to believe that it’s not the students that need to adapt to educators, but rather the educators that need to adapt to them. Students today can and should expect to learn anywhere they are any time they want; they should be able to have the option to have a diverse learning source, not just the formal teacher and peer, but the global environment of classrooms filled with other teachers and peers. This fosters the opportunity for energetic co-learning and co-creation, inciting more dissemination of information for a democratic audience in a digital space. This is one of the greatest values of social media: its openness and interactiveness. It breaks down the walls between student and educator, allowing for all to be both simultaneously. We cannot slow down the consumption of information online, nor can we slow down how it is disrupting the traditions of education. As a result, rather than being the owner of knowledge I feel my responsibility adjusting towards being a facilitator and guider of knowledge. When I post on social media, I feel as though it is a conscious act of preparing my students to understand how to use social media as an educational, positive and professional tool in the modern climate. Information can quickly be disseminated on social media as the classroom goes beyond the walls of a classroom. Furthermore, it allows my students the chance to send me questions, while also keeping them informed and updated on what is occurring in the classroom. This unique avenue generates new forms of engagement that I would not otherwise establish in the typical classroom setting. The future of education will not be limited to physical spaces and classroom doors. Students and non-students alike should be able to learn in relation to updated current technology that allows for learning without bounds. As educators and students, we need to welcome this philosophy and utilize social media for a progressive education and a right step towards the future. You can follow Grace Ji-Sun Kim on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Years ago I devised a classroom demonstration, to use early in a semester when trying to help students become more aware, first, of the multiple dimensions of religion and, more importantly, of the ways in which diverse analytical lens for comparing and contrasting religion in a “toolbox for critical thought” will bring different dimensions forward while leaving others in the shadows.  Conceptually this is not a groundbreaking theoretical intervention for a first week of class exercise, although it does imply some theoretical “chess moves” that I feel strongly about.  Its main value here is to hone an entertaining and effective way to dramatize my points with a set of children’s blocks—both old-school wooden blocks and a few legos—plus a few crowd-pleasing additions to spice up the demonstration. I wrote this up for Teaching Theology and Religion in 2009 and have used it “live” with reliable success many times since then. Since I recently have been experimenting with moving one of my classes online, I decided to make a video version for my voice-over-powerpoint lectures.  It seems potentially useful to share the video here.     

The Liberty Bell. The Franklin Institute. The Betsy Ross House. The Philadelphia Zoo and Botanical Gardens. The Art Museum (infamous for the Rocky run up the stairs). Boat House Row. The Library.  My brother and I attended public schools in Philadelphia, and these were some of the places we visited on trip days. These days were marvelous! Each trip brought great anticipation. We were thrilled about going, doing, being outside of the school building and away from the routine of the classroom setting. Our excitement, and the excitement of our classmates, was palpable. The excitement burst from the classroom into our household. There were permission slips to be signed, brown bag lunches to be packed, and outfits appropriate for the trip to be laid out the night before. Once we returned from the trip, the stories of what happened and what we experienced carried us for days.  Certain people and some kinds of experiences cannot and should not be brought into the classroom confines. Certain knowledge is best encountered in community, in neighborhood, in museums, in parks, and even on rivers and while crossing over oceans. Taking students to new lands, to meet new peoples, to encounter new smells, tastes, sounds, sights, feels and ideas summons the imagination which is too often dampened in classroom spaces. My hunch is that there are mysteries, experiences, knowledges, and truths which refuse to enter into the classroom; these understandings require learners to participate in excursions, pilgrimages, and field trips. In other words, some of the best learning happens outside of the classroom.  Learners must leave home to learn. If done correctly, excursions guarantee a decrease in a teacher’s control of learning and an increase in a student’s control of learning. Many teachers who, for example, have taken learners to the zoo to view the new born panda only to have little Jane or Johnnie be fascinated by the flock of pigeons and never once pay any attention to the pandas. Pigeons were not on the syllabus and will not be on the test! What if learning resists domestication? What if the better learning does not tame us, but instead makes us wild, unruly and free? What if, when given the chance, learners set their paths in such a way as to render our established curricular choices as being contrived and unhelpful in the landscape of the 21st century? What if the roads discovered while learning are more interesting than the roads mapped by teachers? The longer I teach adults, especially scholars, the more I work-at giving up control of their learning and allowing them to “go” by themselves into learning experiences.  In several classes, I required students design their own excursions based upon the themes we were studying in my course. Students were instructed not to go anywhere alone; they had to take someone from class or from their family or friends or church members. I required that the student facilitate a conversation with the accompanying persons and include the comments and impressions (based upon course learning outcomes) of their companions in their excursion report. Some of the most successful learning of students happened when they went into the world with their teenaged children or their church deacons - going together to places they had not been and talking with persons they had previously had no discussions. I learned from my colleague, Heather Elkins, that some excursions are pilgrimages. Sometimes, leaving the classroom requires the search for and journey to holiness and wholeness. I have had the privilege of witnessing the movement of the Holy Spirit with my students in New York City, Newark, Maui, Accra, Dublin and Long Branch, New Jersey.  Sometimes we were in a retreat setting – there for an intensive course. And other times we were traveling together for weeks – crossing borders, visiting our global neighbors in their own homes, mosques and shrines. Pilgrimage learning takes ahold of entire groups and brings expected and unexpected lessons for teacher and learner, alike. My advice is to resist trying to orchestrate trips which demonstrate the theory you are teaching in class as if the theory is in action in the world. Teaching and learning is much more complicated than this - learning defies this mundane dichotomy. Instead, ask yourself: Which colleagues’ work is best encountered, viewed, and metabolized in a visit to their studios, offices, shops, pulpits, and places of business?  What trip will best assist students with connecting the knowledge they have with the knowledge they need?  What experience will challenge the normative gaze of students and allow them a new vantage point upon the complexity of a craft worth seeing differently and better? Then - design a trip. Excursions, field trips, and pilgrimages must not become logistical nightmares; teachers are not travel agents nor concierges. And, refrain from trips where the passivity of the classroom is duplicated in the field.  Students leaving the classroom to sit in different chairs to hear someone else lecture is not optimal. Take students, body-mind-soul, into the world so they can encounter the unknown and the previously misconstrued. My most agile traveling students have always been my international students.  I suppose it makes sense.  If you are courageous enough to leave home and settle in a new country to learn – going to NYC is welcomed – journeying to learn is your motif. My most fearful students were those who had never traveled on urban public transportation and wanted me to rent a bus from New Jersey to New York so they would not have to bump-up-against the peoples. I paired the fearful students with the international students and off we went to see what there was to see (via NJ Transit and NYC subway). We all survived! Sometimes, mystery tiptoes around pedagogical mundanity and refuses to reveal its riches until we take or send our students out into the world. Avoid the mundane and design encounters for your students which will surprise, delight, befuddle, and amaze. What my brother and I remember most about our childhood field trips is that they were days of fun. Learning moved from the daily routine and became enjoyable.  Plan experiences for your students and for yourself which bring fun and joy into the collective learning. I have just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference (SDPC). It was great fun and much joy! SDPC convenes leaders from the academy, church and community to discuss issues of justice. This year more than one thousand persons attended the Washington DC conference.  Also present were two hundred fourteen seminarians attending the conference for academic credit.  This excursion keeps me informed and reminds me of the critical importance of partners and collaborators. The plenary speakers, workshop leaders, preachers and musicians assist me in thinking through the social, economic, and political realities which so greatly impact the teaching and learning in colleges, universities and seminaries. Like the trips in elementary school, my excursion to SDPC renewed my spirit and sent me back to the Wabash Center with new questions and refreshed curiosities. The Wabash Center is a destination for those teachers who want to leave home in order to learn. We are an excursion, a field trip, and in many cases, a pilgrimage. What would it mean for the Wabash Center to expand and deepen the experience of learning by teachers? If the better learning requires leaving the familiar for the unfamiliar, in what ways might the Wabash Center became “unfamiliar” even for the most seasoned teacher? In what ways might the Wabash Center pitch a wider tent for more pilgrims who fear domestication and who are willing to risk gathering and scattering to kindle and rekindle the delight of learning while a teacher?