If you would like to prepare for the visit of Dr. Rebecca Cox on April 15, I encourage you to read her informative but concise book The College Fear Factor: how students and professors misunderstand one another. CTLE has a copy to loan or you can purchase one from the B&N Bookstore on campus by contacting Brian Esquivel (email: sm250@bncollege.com or x8342). There will be book signing opportunities throughout her visit. Tameka Bannarbie with the University Press did a nice job covering the Bob Noyd workshops in her article. The pictures with the story illustrate Dr. Noyd's active teaching approach as well. Are you struggling to give your students the best written assessment feedback? Agnes M. Rae and David K. Cochrane offer help in their article and note that one aspect of their findings, feed-forward assessment, has been found to be highly significant in
relation to supporting learning from assessment. Feed-forward can be adopted as a teaching and learning strategy to improve each student’s capacity to understand what and how they learn, and to encourage lifelong learning. Anushka Mohideen shares her thoughts about being a new college student. You will recognize many of her concerns in your own students.

Dr. Bob Noyd has been generous enough to provide the material used in his workshops held March 23. The session on critical thinking emphasized that your plan of action should always begin with your learning goals. The session on effective instructional strategies focused on critical analysis by the instructor on determining the best teaching methods especially as it relates to active learning. Reviewing the comments from the eighty participants, it is obvious that the day was very useful and had an impact. We will be sharing some of the individual comments in the coming days. As mentioned previously, Dr. Rebecca Cox will be visiting LU on April 15. Her faculty session "Understanding The New Student Learning Paradigm: How to Help your Students Succeed" is set for 9:05 a.m. in the John Gray Center Seminar Rooms A and B. You are encouraged to register now. Dr. Cox will also be making a presentation to our students and we are encouraging the faculty to incentivize attendance. More on this later. Formative assessment occurs when teachers feed information back to students in ways that enable the student to learn better, or when students can engage in a similar, self-reflective process. Evidence shows that high quality formative assessment does have a powerful impact on student learning. Formative assessment is particularly effective for students who have not done well in school, thus narrowing the gap between low and high achievers while raising overall achievement. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's article "Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment" is a good start if you are interested in exploring ways you can implement this useful assessment tool into your kit.

The response to the faculty development workshops given by Dr. Bob Noyd this past Wednesday has been loud and clear and all positive. Throughout the day, we had eighty of LU's passionate and committed faculty and administrators attend the three sessions. The discussion in the sessions was terrific. We hope that ongoing discussion continues to add value. remember to check the blog frequently as we will post Dr. Noyd's PowerPoint presentations very soon. One of the reoccurring themes of the sessions was the idea of class alignment. Very frequently we are sending mixed messages to our students by emphasizing certain things in the classroom but asking them about completely unrelated things on tests or during assessment. A great resource that explains this and other very useful things for the classroom teacher is an article by David A. Whetten. He notes that teachers should specify what they expect their students to learn in a course or, more specifically, how they expect their students will be changed by this learning experience and what they should be able to do upon completion. One of the goals Bob Noyd had for the day was to move faculty up the ladder based on G. S. Akerlind's growth and development chart. Akerlind's research proposes that from an education development perspective, a vital consideration in teaching development is an academics’ understanding of what teaching and developing as a teacher can mean under varying circumstances. Special thanks to Christy Swanson, Rezvan Khoshlessan and Adam Easterling for their assistance with the workshops. We will have specific information about Dr. Rebecca Cox's visit on April 15 posted very soon.

Are you putting together your packet for promotion and tenure? Do you want to enhance your vitae in a quick and easy way? Attending the faculty development workshops on Wednesday, March 23 is a great way. Bob Noyd will be giving three interactive sessions in the Spindletop Room of Gray Library beginning at 9:05 a.m. You still have time to register. Understanding educational pedagogy is key to becoming the teacher you always wanted to be and this event provides the necessary avenue. With finals a little over six weeks away, now would be a great time to conduct a student Small Group Analysis (SGA). A CTLE consultant would be happy to meet with your students to collect their thoughts about your class. After the comments are collected and processed, we meet with you to discuss the student responses and suggest some possible enhancements. An SGA can provide valuable insight into what students think is working well in the classroom. All consultations are held confidential so please contact CTLE to begin the process. It can make all the difference in your end-of-semester evaluation rating. When black students reflected on the idea that everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity, initially struggles to adjust to college, their academic performance and longer-term well-being benefited, according to a paper published in the journal Science by Gregory M. Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen. The paper is a nice read in preparation of the visit by Dr. Becky Cox, who will be at LU on April 15.

The registration numbers are growing by the day for the faculty development event by Bob Noyd on March 23. His three sessions will cover timely topics important to anybody involved in the instruction of college students. Please take a moment to register for one or all of the interactive sessions now as it is important for us to have an accurate count for space and food. Adam Easterling has joined the staff of CTLE as a student assistant. Adam is a freshman who graduated from Monsignor Kelly Catholic High School in Beaumont and is majoring in engineering. Waterloo's Teaching-Based Research Group (TBRG), in association with the Centre for Teaching Excellence and the Teaching Excellence Council invites you to participate in a two-day conference of research on teaching and learning and its application in the course setting. Keynote speaker is Dr. Maryellen Weimer, who will give the Presidents’ Colloquium talk, Can Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Actually Improve my Teaching? Keeley, Smith, and Buskist, in their article "Differentiating Psychology Students’ Perceptions of Teachers Using the Teacher Behaviors Checklist," asked students to rate their best and worst college professors using the Teacher Behaviors Checklist at two different types of institutions. They found that the teachers at the two institutions, one heavily focused on research while the second was more teaching focused, received similar ratings.

CTLE is now accepting reservations for the series of workshops to be presented by Bob Noyd on March 23. The faculty development sessions will be interactive and immediately useful. There is an interesting article that focuses on enhancing the learning process. Matthias Nücklesa, Sandra Hübnerb and Alexander Renklb report that prompts are a very effective means to stimulate beneficial cognitive and metacognitive strategies in writing learning protocols. Providing students with organization and elaboration prompts clearly raised the amount of organization and elaboration strategies in the learning protocols. Similarly, the provision of prompts for monitoring and planning of remedial strategies strongly increased students' efforts to monitor and regulate their understanding of the subject: the students did not only attempt to identify comprehension deficits more intensively, but also when faced with an identified problem, they showed more effort to plan and realize remedial cognitive strategies in order to improve their comprehension. Rebecca D. Cox in her book The College Fear Factor writes "Even before students step into the classroom, their varying levels of interest in the subject, their assumptions about college instruction, and their uncertainties create a series of instructional dilemmas. Further complicating the picture are professors' conceptions of what constitutes appropriate college student behavior, and teachers' lack of understanding about what prevents students from acting in accordance with those norms. At the same time, when instructors recognize the reasons for students' disappointing performance--whether in class or on assignments--they are much more likely to respond effectively." Cox will talk about this and more during her visit to LU on April 15.

In teaching-intensive environments, instructors may subconsciously be short-circuiting the learning process by doing too much for students—too much of the thinking, too much of the mental processing, too much of the work, and taking on too much of the responsibility for student success. What defines overteaching? What factors contribute to overteaching? Are you prone to overteaching? Where do you draw the line? Dr. Bob Noyd will share his thoughts on the topic of overteaching at a series of interactive workshops on March 23. Come and spend the day in the Spindletop Room high atop the Gray Library. This is definitely worth rescheduling a class or bringing a substitute in for the day. Richard J. Light in his book Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds offers the following insight on faculty who make a difference. "When asked to rate courses they take, students often give the most rigorous and demanding classes their highest ratings. The faculty members who had an especially big impact are those who helped students make connections between serious curriculum, on the one hand, and the students' personal lives, values, and experiences, on the other. Students praise certain faculty members who build such connections into their teaching." CTLE owns a copy of this book and would be happy to lend it to you. Andrea Leskes and Barbara D. Wright in their book The Art and Science of Assessing General Education Outcomes: A Practical Guide suggest that a campus-wide embrace of assessment can promote better understanding of the purposes of general education and remedy its neglect on the part of students and faculty alike. They note the following, "The best evidence of learning is direct evidence: student work and performances that can be examined to determine what students know and can do." They recommend the use of authentic tasks that mimic the situations or problem solving that students might experience in real-world settings.

Many of the nation's university presidents are attending the American Council on Education's annual meeting and the mood appears gloomy. Jonathan R. Cole, provost of Columbia University, asked "If we are so good, why do we feel so bad?" William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said "We are on a trajectory of having the largest population of adults without a college degree of any industrialized nation. The problem is that states now consider higher education a discretionary item in the budget." Richard C. Levin, the president of Yale University, is on a mission to make the case that colleges and universities are worth supporting, especially in economically desperate times. "With every category of discretionary public expenditure under serious scrutiny, it is incumbent upon us to make the case for higher education with renewed vigor," he told a room full of administrators from two- and four-year colleges. He acknowledged that he was preaching to the choir but added that "elected officials and many of our fellow citizens do not share our experience and do not necessarily share our conclusions." The Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference is accepting proposals until Monday, March 21, 2011 for their 23rd annual event. If selected to present, your paper will then be vetted for inclusion in the peer-reviewed periodical the Journal of Ethnographic & Qualitative Research. How do you make the decision to use one teaching method rather than another? Is it tied to the subject matter or your comfort level? Are you frustrated that many times the class you planned did not accomplish the learning goals you had set? Dr. Bob Noyd will be discussing this and more at a series of three workshops on March 23 at LU. Mark your calendars now and do not miss what promises to be an extraordinary event.

Crucial to understanding even the basic ideas behind how students learn is the taxonomy created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. Lorin Anderson led a group of cognitive psychologists in the 1990s who revised and updated the classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. Moving students from remembering and understanding to evaluating and creating is the ultimate goal. The ability to think critically using quantitative methods, communicate effectively, and lead and follow holding to our societal ethics can be learned and we should model these skills as we impart them to our students. Dr. Bob Noyd will be covering this topic in depth at the workshop planned for March 23 at 9:05 a.m. in the Spindletop Room. The Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal is now accepting submissions on the major theme of University 2.0. They are looking for submissions for the peer-reviewed electronic journal with an open time line. We are happy to welcome Rezvan Khoshlessan to the Center as a graduate assistant. Rezvan is currently pursuing an Ed.D. in educational leadership and brings a wealth of teaching experience with her. Dr. Lee Burdette Williams writes, “Our students are different people late at night. In our classrooms and offices during the day or the library or practice rooms in the evening, they are smart, charming, ambitious, clear-headed and reasonably nice to one another. But like a collegiate version of Teen Wolf, as the clock ticks closer to midnight, they become unrecognizable to us.” This is one of the topics that Dr. Rebecca Cox will be discussing when she visits LU on April 15.

The Writing Across the Curriculum Teaching and Learning Circle will meet on Wednesday, March 2 at 3:30 p.m. in the Poetry Room of the Maes Building. Circle Facilitator Melissa Hudler reports that the topic of discussion will be the recent article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the writing abilities of students at 10 universities in Texas. You can check out the original article on the February 9 blog entry below. Are you concerned that your students may not be retaining anything you have taught them? You might want to try what David Head did in his class at UCF. On each of the final exams he has given over the past three semesters he included the following question, worth one point of extra credit: "What one thing from the course did you find most memorable? Explain why." The responses he received were very surprising. Dr. Rebecca Cox is set to visit LU on April 15. The Center has purchased two copies of her book The College Fear Factor: How students and professors misunderstand one another. If you would like to borrow a copy, please contact the Center. We encourage you to use the data she gathered in her longitudinal study, all included in the book, to jump start conversations in your classroom. Dr. Cox plans to hold a session for faculty as well as one for students when she visits. We hope you have noticed the flyer in your mailbox announcing the three sessions to be delivered by Dr. Bob Noyd on March 23. We were careful to schedule the interactive workshops to coincide with the class schedule for your convenience.