As we enter the home stretch of the Fall 2011 semester at Lamar University, we want to remind you that the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement is here for you. Take a look at the services we offer and let us know if there is something else we can do to help you improve as a teacher. In addition, remember that the Quality Enhancement Plan indicates that LU will increase the use of teaching methods that promote active learning in all of our classes but especially in the core courses. You can download a copy of the QEP now. If you are looking for some teaching techniques specific to your discipline, contact us for some individualized attention. As you begin to think about your courses for next semester, we wanted to suggest you take a look at a terrific article by Suzanne Weinstein and Shao-Wei Wu entitled Readiness Assessment Tests vs. Frequent Quizzes: Student Preferences. They write, "If an instructor’s objective is for students to do the readings prior to class and be prepared to participate fully in class discussions, she should consider using Readiness Assessment Tests to provide some external motivation. However, if an instructor’s objective is for students to learn the material in any way possible, and/or there isn’t time enough to score student responses every class period, he might consider weekly quizzes as an alternative." The call for proposals has been issued for the 2012 Southwest Teaching & Learning Conference to be held March 30 and 31, 2012 in San Antonio. They are looking for proposals from any field including but not limited to: business, education, arts and sciences, as well as technical and vocational programs. While the primary emphasis is on college and university teaching and learning, they welcome proposals from all scholars. The conference aims to facilitate a discussion of the particular issues associated with educating traditionally under-served student populations. This year’s focus is on technology in the classroom to enhance the teaching and learning process.

Just finished reading a really interesting article by Chip Heath and Dan Heath entitled "Teaching that Sticks." It is based on their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The Heath brothers have identified the six traits that they feel make an idea sticky and they include: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and story. The Heath's say, "As a teacher, you are on the front lines of stickiness. Every single day, you've got to wake up in the morning and go make ideas stick. And let's face it, this is no easy mission. Few students burst into the classroom, giddy with anticipation, ready for the latest lesson on punctuation, polynomials, or pilgrims." The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) has just released a full report called "Making Student Learning Evidence Transparent: The State of the Art." The report focuses on identifying best practices when it comes to institutions reporting their assessment data. Case Western Reserve University lists a fact of the day drawn from their institutional assessment data. One of the findings of NILOA is that institutions post assessment information more frequently than many would likely have guessed but the information is often hidden or not presented effectively. The Sustainability Across the Curriculum Faculty Learning Community (FLC) met on Monday to set their academic year outcome goals. Look for a survey in your email box soon as this FLC is very interested in learning what is currently occurring in the sustainability arena at LU. If you would like to get involved with this FLC contact facilitator Tony Pereira or co-facilitator Matt Hoch. "We do think we and the institutions have a public responsibility to stand behind the quality of education we provide our graduates, beyond just 120 credit hours and a 3.0 [grade point average]," said Ralph S. Wolff. "The big thing here we're trying to shift is from just ensuring that institutions are engaging in the process of assessment, to being about what the results are and what they mean. And are they good enough for us?" Wolff's comments came in a story about the Western Association of Colleges and Schools attempt to ratchet up their accreditation requirements. This fall Stanford University took a step forward in the open-education movement by offering three free online courses, following in the footsteps of several other elite colleges like Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The three classes being offered—”Machine Learning,” “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” and “Introduction to Databases“—are among some of the university’s most popular computer-science courses. Enrollment figures for the courses seemingly back up this claim: Andrew Ng, the professor for the machine-learning course, has approximately 94,000 students enrolled in his class alone. Students in the class includes high schoolers, grandmothers, and soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. “Teaching tens of thousands of students at a time is a very gratifying experience,” he said.

Personal narrative plays an important role in Mike Garver’s teaching style. Garver, a professor of marketing at Central Michigan University, often uses anecdotes from his own life in his lectures. Now, with the arrival of technology that allows him to easily record his lectures at home, slice them into easily digestible morsels, and make them available for students to watch online prior to class meetings, he uses those personal anecdotes to move his teaching to the higher levels of learning described by Bloom's Taxonomy. “I kind of gave up lecturing in the classroom,” Garver says, adding that he was tired of having to choose between introducing ideas and letting students try putting them into practice. “There was never enough time for both,” he says. As you know, we are a big proponent of Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do. Bain also offers an annual seminar called the Best Teachers Summer Institute. There are still a few slots available according to an email we received earlier this week. The High School to College Transition Faculty Learning Community met earlier this week for the first time. FLC Facilitator Tanya Goldbeck reports that they are planning to conduct a inventory to document what types of interventions are already in place that help incoming students make the transition. The Creating an Online Course of Substance FLC will meet today at 3:30 PM in 621 MJGL. Contact facilitator Nancy Blume or co-facilitator Cheng-Hsien Lin for more information. We are still receiving positive feedback on the recent visit by Diane Halpern, Over 94 percent of the workshop participants found the sessions to be very helpful or helpful. The same percentage found that the speaker was very informative or informative. Many of the participants noted their appreciation for the handout "25 Learning Principles to Guide Pedagogy and the Design of Learning Environments." If you would like your very own copy, contact a member of CT+LE. One of our favorite principles is spaced effects. Spaced schedules of testing produce better long-term retention than a single test. Teachers should give frequent tests so that the high scores on tests that are immediately given after learning can be maintained over time. Spaced effects is based on research by Bahrick, Bahrick, Bahrick, and Bahrick (1993), Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, and Rohrer (2006), and Cull (2000).

The room was buzzing on November 10 as Dr. Diane Halpern presented an interactive session "Teaching and Assessing Critical Thinking: Helping College Students Become Better Thinkers." Halpern delivered a powerful session based on her career-long research on critical thinking. Her thesis for the session was "the best education for life in the 21st century must be built on the twin pillars of learning how to learn and how to think critically about the vast array of information that confronts us." Nancy Adams (educational leadership) said that she plans to use probing question strategies in her classroom to enhance her student's learning. Weihang Zhu (industrial engineering) plans to design some instruction methods to encourage critical thinking. Martha Rinker (psychology) plans to use the worksheet approach that Halpern described during the session. Randy Yoder (biology) appreciated the various approaches demonstrated by Halpern on how critical thinking skills can be taught. The discussion continues today at 3:00 PM in 622 MJGL. Halpern Sessions Revisited will be an opportunity for those who attended the session and those who were not able, to come together, share notes, and discuss teaching strategies designed to improve critical thinking in all LU students. CT+LE will provide handouts from the Halpern sessions.

"Real-life problems are messy. Sometimes there are multiple goals, and sometimes we'll return to this question several times, as our understanding of the goal will often change after we've worked on it for a while. A clearly articulated goal will provide direction to the thinking process and allow you to make better decisions about the skills you will need to use. In the course of thinking about real-world problems, you may need to change direction and redefine the problem and the desired outcome several times, but it's still important to have an outcome in mind to provide some focus. After all, if you don't know where you're going, you can never be sure if you've arrived," says Dr. Diane Halpern who will be in Beaumont on Thursday and Friday of this week. She will deliver two powerful sessions filled with the latest scholarship on critical thinking and cognitive learning. You still have time to register for either session. Welcome packets for students at Western Governors University now include a free Webcam, part of an extensive monitoring program used by the online university to make sure test-takers are who they say they are. At Western Governors, the average student is 36 years old, has a family, and takes a full course load on top of holding a full-time job. Because it’s convenient for them to be able to take tests from home, students have embraced the technology, says Janet W. Schnitz, associate provost for assessment and interim provost at the university. The university, which first started handing out cameras in July 2010, now has over 30,000 Web cams in use. Of American students at the top programs, Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, found that 29 percent came from just eight universities (the U.S. News & World Report top 10, minus the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), another 18 percent came from other universities in the magazine's top 25, and another 11 percent from elsewhere in the top 50. With another large group coming from leading liberal arts colleges, the analysis found that only 19 percent came from the 3,000-plus colleges and universities that don't sit on the top of anyone's rankings. Schwitzgebel's research focused on philosophy, but at least one other study has found a similar clustering in the students who enroll in graduate programs in history -- programs that are generally much larger than those in philosophy. Robert B. Townsend of the American Historical Association published a study in 2005 in which he found that about 100 generally elite undergraduate institutions produced the students who make up 55 percent of the graduate enrollments in Ph.D. programs. The history study found that the share of Ph.D. enrollment from those undergraduate institutions had been a bit lower during the 1980s, but increased again during the 1990s. As we move forward with our Quality Enhancement Plan, it is important to redesign our courses using active learning methods. The modification of traditional lectures is one way to incorporate active learning in the classroom. Research has demonstrated, for example, that if a faculty member allows students to consolidate their notes by pausing three times for two minutes each during a lecture, students will learn significantly more information (Ruhl, Hughes, and Schloss 1987). Two other simple yet effective ways to involve students during a lecture are to insert brief demonstrations or short, ungraded writing exercises followed by class discussion. Certain alternatives to the lecture format further increase student level of engagement: (1) the feedback lecture, which consists of two mini-lectures separated by a small-group study session built around a study guide, and (2) the guided lecture, in which students listen to a 20- to 30-minute presentation without taking notes, followed by their writing for five minutes what they remember and spending the remainder of the class period in small groups clarifying and elaborating the material.

It is always nice to be validated. As many of you know, CT+LE frequently reminds you to constantly take the pulse of your class. That means at the minimum you should do a mid-semester teaching evaluation and then read it and actually make adjustments based on your findings. Typically faculty who adhere to that process receive higher teaching evaluations at the end of the semester. Students appreciate faculty who care enough to listen and revise the course delivery to enhance their learning. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article saying essentially the same thing. There is still time to register for either of the two sessions planned for November 10 and 11. As you know, Dr. Diane Halpern will be visiting LU as part of the ongoing faculty development series. This past Wednesday and Thursday, LU sent a team that included Edythe Kirk, Charlotte Mizener, Brenda Nichols, Paula Nichols, and Todd Pourciau to the Reinventing Instruction and Learning Conference hosted by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in Austin. The team was able to divide and conquer allowing us to attend almost every session. The plan is to meet soon and debrief. The results will be shared in this space so stay tuned. The Active Research and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Faculty Learning Community (FLC) is holding its first meeting on Monday, November 7 at 3:00 PM. The FLC will meet at Ana's Mexican Bakery on Calder in the newly remodeled patio. If you are planning to get involved with this FLC, this is a can't miss meeting as they are setting the agenda for the remainder of the academic year. Contact Vanessa Villate or Chiung-Fang Chang for more information. In addition, the High School to College Transition FLC will be meeting on Monday, November 14 at 1:30 PM in 621 MJGL. Again, now is the final time to commit to this FLC by attending the meeting or contacting Tanya Goldbeck or Paul Hemenway. One of our readers shared a very interesting story that resonated because of the similarities between the featured institution and LU. The article, which appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, says, "Stretched thin by a mile-wide mission and an equally broad pool of students, Cleveland State is, like many similar institutions, stuck in the mushy middle of higher education. For decades, such universities have been reaching for higher education's brass ring: a bigger share of research grants and accompanying prestige. Now many regional public colleges are trying to balance their aspirations with reality, focusing on the economic and educational needs of their regions rather than striving to compete nationally."