Resources
Cognitive strategies are pedagogical ways that enable learners to manage their own learning. They mediate the transition from teaching to student learning. Instructors and students acquire cognitive strategies from their experience and schooling—for better or worse. Many instructors settle on those strategies that "work," or seem to. This is a pragmatic approach often uncritically unlinked to foundational theories of learning or research-based knowledge. The danger here is that it does not take long for these uncritically held strategies to become biased practices. An instructor will continue to use them even when they stop working. Lacking rigorous assessments of learning there is danger in continuing to use methods even when they don't work. Below are four theory- and research-based cognitive strategies. Most instructors use some form or another and likely refer to these as "methods" or "approaches." You can download a handout of these strategies here. Input Cognitive Strategies. An input cognitive strategy depends on those things to which learners pay attention. Most instructors overestimate the level of attention students give to the instructional intent of learning experience (the teacher's lecture, for example). Aside from short attention spans, learners pay attention to events external to them, by their own choice, or by distraction. An external stimulation might include anxiety about a job loss or family situation, which creates significant emotional distraction and is an un-motivator to learn. An internal stimulation might include remembering a career goal, which will motivate learners to give attention to those things in the lesson that will help meet that goal. Input cognitive strategies are applied to intentionally gain and maintain student attention. The rule is: students learn that to which they pay attention; and when they don't pay attention, they don't learn. Process Cognitive Strategies. A process cognitive strategy helps learners make sense of what they learn. Gagné and Medsker (1996) list several such as, Rehearsal: trying out something new; Elaboration: associating something new with something previously learned; Organization: imposing a structure on what is newly learned through such methods as outlining, categorizing, or diagramming. Instructors need to embed student learning activities throughout the lesson or course that facilitate these experiences. Output Cognitive Strategies. An output cognitive strategy helps ensure that learners acquire new knowledge or skills by applying what they have learned and making meaning of their experiences. For example, assigning learners to teach on something they would like to learn. The teaching (output) focuses the learners’ attention on organizing the new knowledge or skill to teach it to others. Through this approach, learners make sense of what they want to learn. Feedback Cognitive Strategies. Through feedback cognitive strategies learners to acquire new knowledge or skills by giving feedback to others. An example is to ask learners to hear a presentation or sermon and provide feedback to another student about that delivery. Giving feedback focuses the learners’ attention on organizing the new knowledge or skill to provide feedback to others. It is necessary to provide students a rubric of the concepts, principles, or criteria for assessment upon which to give feedback. For more information on cognitive strategies see Rothwell, William J., et al., Mastering the Instructional Design Process : A Systematic Approach, Center for Creative Leadership, 2015. See also Gagne and Medsker, The Conditions of Learning Wadsworth Publishing, 1996.
This post will focus on developing anti-racist and anti-ableist modes of assessment, and how things like contract grading can be a way for students to create their own forms of success in classrooms (instead of being held unfailingly to one standard model of “success” that doesn’t fit most students).
Recent student demands within the academy for “safe space” have aroused concern about the constraints they might impose on free speech and academic freedom. There are as many kinds of safety as there are threats to the things that human beings might care about. That is why we need to be very clear about the specific threats of which the intended beneficiaries of safe space are supposed to be relieved. Much of the controversy can be dissolved by distinguishing between “dignity safety,” to which everyone has a right, and “intellectual safety” of a kind that is repugnant to the education worth having. Psychological literature on stereotype threat and the interventions that alleviate its adverse effects shed light on how students’ equal dignity can be made safe in institutions without compromising liberty. But “intellectual safety” in education can only be conferred at the cost of indulging close-mindedness and allied vices. Tension between securing dignity safety and creating a fittingly unsafe intellectual environment can be eased when teaching and institutional ethos promote the virtue of civility. Race is used throughout the article as the example of a social category that can spur legitimate demands for “dignity safe space.”
The demographics of college campuses are changing and necessitate faculty provide a safe and inclusive environment for learning. The purpose of this study was to examine how faculty establish a sense of belonging in their classrooms, using focus group methodology to explore issues of power, privilege, and access at the postsecondary level. Faculty (N = 33) representing multiple identity groups discussed opportunities and challenges in effectively reaching diverse groups of students. Three thematic categories emerged illustrating how faculty prepare their courses for inclusive content, develop in-class instructional practices including methods regarding assessment, and believe in professional responsibility through persistent role modeling.
Video. Posted on EduCause website. To make higher education sustainable, we must understand the incoming generations. It's true that we're serving more and different generations than ever. And one sector that's often misunderstood is Generation Z. David Stillman, who spoke at the recent Educause Annual Conference, is the co-author of "Gen Z @ Work: "How The Next Generation Is Transforming The Workplace." He wrote the book with his Generation Z son, Jonah Stillman. A conversation with the Stillmans revealed four things we should know about Gen Z. Number one, students in Gen Z are the first digital natives.
A growing number of people completing or holding graduate degrees now seek non-faculty positions—also called alternative academic, or “alt-ac” positions—at different stages in their careers. While an increasing number of people with doctoral degrees are hunting for a diminishing pool of tenure-track faculty jobs, most degree-granting institutions do not adequately prepare their graduate students to enter the new reality of the alt-ac job market. Yet the administrative ranks in higher education institutions are growing, as colleges and universities are creating a diverse range of positions that support teaching and learning efforts. Focusing on the range of potential alternative career choices, this highly practical book offers tools and prompts for readers who are: -Considering whether to choose an alt-ac career path -Seeking specific alt-ac positions -Advising graduate students or mentoring recent professional graduates -Encountering alt-ac career challenges The authors offer case stories—their own and those of colleagues across North America in alt-ac roles—with concrete examples designed to help readers pursue, obtain, and excel in a wide variety of alt-ac positions. The book can equally be used as a resource for graduate courses on professional development and job-market preparation. (From the Publisher)
This is a visionary, consciousness-raising book that asks us to rethink the purposes and design of study away and study abroad experiences in the context of a broadened set of global threats, including climate disruption, soaring inequality, ecosystem breakdown, the dying off of distinct languages and cultural communities, and the threat of a nuclear catastrophe. As we ask students to truly comprehend this world from the privileged perspective of the global North, Rich Slimbach asks us to consider two fundamental questions: What and how should we learn? And having learned, for what should we use what we know? A panoply of pedagogies and methods of inquiry – from study away/abroad and service-based learning to diversity programming, environmental education, and community-based research – aim to develop students who both understand the challenges faced by global communities and act in ways that advance their social and environmental health. What temperaments, social habits, and intellectual abilities will they need to help heal their corner of creation? And what pedagogical perspectives, principles, and procedures can best support them in this creative challenge? Rich Slimbach argues that transforming student consciousness and life choices requires a global learning curriculum that integrates multi-disciplinary inquiry into the structural causes of problems that riddle the common good, along with mechanisms that bid students to cross borders, to pay attention, and to listen to those unlike themselves. At its heart, this book proposes a truly transformative approach to community-engaged global learning. (From the Publisher)
As a teacher trained in textual analysis and the religious practices of living human communities, the language of images, videos, and recorded sound are not my mother tongue. Yet, I know that for my students, communicating in an era where these visual forms of communication are the lingua franca of the people they lead means that they must develop the capacity to deploy images and cinematic narrative styles to engage their leadership teams, parishioners, board members, students, or volunteers in not-for-profit organizations. So must I. Given the powerful digital image-making and sharing tools that over 77% of the US population carries in their pockets, working in video and image while teaching is not a problem of a lack of technology. A lack of fluency keeps us from speaking these languages. However, like learning to communicate in a foreign language, the only way forward is to begin to speak. Many of us have had the experience of trying to hold a conversation in a language where we have novice level competency. We search for words, we stumble over the technicalities, we feel our intelligence level has been dropped by decades because we have only the most rudimentary vocabulary to express complex ideas. Learning to work in the visual languages of digital media is no different. We may have fabulous pedagogical visions for what is possible, but our capacity to capture those ideas and craft them to our satisfaction feels elementary and gawky. We have all been trained by our daily exposure to visual culture to recognize good visual communication when we see it. As veteran radio producer Ira Glass once noted, when we start a new form of creative work, our taste often outdistances our ability and causes us to become discouraged in what we produce. And as professors, we often do not want to appear a beginner, especially in something we are trying to teach our students. Rather than continuing to practice that new creative form, many of us, cowed by the challenge, stick with what we do best. We work primarily in text and demand that our students do so as well, whether or not this is to their detriment in the performance of their leadership when they leave our programs. After my first miserable quarter of teaching youth ministries online a decade ago, I realized that I was going to have to learn to play online if I was going to be able to teach online. The easy student interactions, the joy of conversation and dialogue, the embodied relationality of the physical classroom was gone, and I was either going to have to quit teaching or figure out how to do some of those things in a virtual environment. That is what drove me to join Facebook, and I began to reconnect with family members and friends far distant in time and space, practicing the skills I needed to teach online. I re-discovered how to be playful, to delight in connection with other human beings, to share things that were important to me in online settings. Practicing those skills in an environment where I was not the expert allowed me to develop them and deploy them in my teaching work. Likewise, I think faculty benefit from opportunities to play with new forms of visual communication outside of the classrooms in order to learn how to work with those languages. This could take many forms. My own faculty at Iliff brought in a photographer for a playful session during faculty retreat where we learned how to compose images and edit them with Snapseed. We wandered the retreat center, snapping photos and editing them digitally on our phones, then enjoyed a slide show at the end where we explored the resulting images. During the “Teaching with Digital Media” Workshop at the Wabash Center last summer, we sent faculty with disparate teaching contexts and fields of expertise off for an afternoon to create a “Teach Something in a Minute” video (a classroom exercise that Elizabeth Drescher had previously developed with her students at Santa Clara University). Participants decided on their topic, storyboarded videos, shot them around campus, edited them in free available software, and screened them that evening. We set minimal criteria (videos had to be one minute long; had to include titles, moving and still images; needed a soundtrack; all members of the three person team had to be involved in creating it), but otherwise allowed them to do what they could in the time allotted. We also invited the participants in the Wabash Programming Leadership Event into a similar activity to create short videos communicating the significance of various Wabash Center programs last October. The trajectory of these experiences for participants has been the same. Disbelief at the enormity of the task without adequate instruction in the technologies and techniques. Frustration at their lack of prior experience in filmmaking. Emerging eagerness to give it a try as they work together. Laughter and camaraderie as they shoot the material. Frustration with learning editing techniques as they try to pull together the piece in limited time. Moderate satisfaction with a finished project. Pride in their team’s efforts and emerging confidence to try again another time. No faculty inservice on the importance of digital media or demonstration of someone else’s use of digital media in teaching would serve as well as playfully engaging in the task of speaking the new language together and using it to teach one another.
When the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) emerged, it often concentrated on individual faculty practice in one classroom; it is now, however, increasingly common to find work in SoTL focused more broadly. SoTL studies may engage with a cluster of courses, a program, a particular population of students, a pedagogical approach, or a field—all of which are represented in the essays collected here by authors from a diverse array of institutions and nations. This volume features examples of SoTL research conducted in, and applied to, a variety of contexts and disciplines, offering a theoretical framework for an expanded vision of SoTL—one that moves beyond the individual classroom. (From the Publisher)
Many students struggle with the transition from high school to university life. This is especially true of first-generation college students, who are often unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of academia. College professors usually want to help, but many feel overwhelmed by the prospect of making extra time in their already hectic schedules to meet with these struggling students. 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty is a guidebook filled with practical solutions to this problem. It gives college faculty concrete exercises and tools they can use both inside and outside of the classroom to effectively bolster the academic success and wellbeing of their students. To devise these strategies, educational sociologist Lisa M. Nunn talked with a variety of first-year college students, learning what they find baffling and frustrating about their classes, as well as what they love about their professors’ teaching. Combining student perspectives with the latest research on bridging the academic achievement gap, she shows how professors can make a difference by spending as little as fifteen minutes a week helping their students acculturate to college life. Whether you are a new faculty member or a tenured professor, you are sure to find 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty to be an invaluable resource. (From the Publisher)