The end of the semester and the start of a new one

University teaching has a distinct cycle tied to the semester schedule. It starts with a lot of excitement about new adventures and opportunities and finishes with a sense of exhaustion and then completion and gratification. You all have done a great job "hanging in there." It has become clear that you deal with many challenges, and I hope a number of things we covered in this course has helped you personally deal with some of those challenges.

Here is the summary of points I took away from your final blog. I formated them as suggestions you may want to follow.

GRAD 6100
Final Blog Summary

1) On identifying learning styles. If you don’t have the time or tools to do so, remember that you will always have different learning styles in your class/lab. The best approach is to offer a number of different learning activities that actively engage students: make them do something, have them reflect on what they learned from it, and what they will do with what they learned.
2) Teaching a course is all about time management. It is really easy to get caught up in teaching related activities because they are immediate and always require your attention. Appropriately limit the time you spend on teaching related activities and develop strategies that help you deal with the tasks quickly and effectively (such as using clear and simple rubrics for grading).
3) Create lesson plans in outline with a timeline. If you need to put the critical text/items students really need to know in the lesson plan or on a PPT
4) Learn to manage your time; decide on a strategy, any strategy and execute it!
5) Keep working on your writing skills and use the resources available to you.
6) Work hard on clarifying the learning objectives and goals. They should drive all activities you have the students complete and the type of assessments (quizzes, projects, exams, paper, etc) you require of them to show they understand the material. They will guide your test question writing as well.
7) Use Classroom Assessment Techniques (like the one-minute paper and others) to find out what students are thinking.
8) Go back through the semester’s materials and your textbook to refresh/renew/learn about effective teaching strategies. It’s all there.
9) Make the syllabus a tool of communication to inform the students what the course is about; make them read it by quizzing them over it (for example)
10) Designing a course takes a lot of forethought and an in-depth understanding of the material, especially what should be learned first, second, third…; in other words the sequencing (scaffolding) of material that becomes progressively more complex. No easy way around this one.
11) Know the assumptions you are making about your students, their learning and your teaching, and check if they are correct or not.
12) Reflect on this semester, learn from your experiences, and think about improvements you want to make next semester.
13) Don’t hesitate to ask for help when you’re stuck with a teaching problems or a problem student.

Goals following graduation

Here is the summary of your thoughts on goals beyond graduation.

Summary of Blog 11
1. Get out in the community and expand my contacts and network to help in the job hunt.
2. Get a residency/internship/post-doc position but find a good on that fits your goals
3. Adjust your goals as conditions change
4. Keep your plan over your desk and update it weekly
5. Use your time in grad school for more than just completing your classes. Use all the resources available to benefit your future goals.
6. Align your graduate projects, thesis, dissertation to your future goals; plan your activities in graduate school to benefit you beyond your diploma.
7. Enter your goals into your time management system and give them priority in your daily actions
8. Collaborate with others and let them help achieve my goals
9. Focus! on what is really important and spend time on that.
10. Have a backup plan that is attractive to you as well, just in case things don’t work out.
11. Do things during graduate school that you want to do after graduation; it will help you learn whether that is really what you want to do; if so, it will give you valuable experience.
12. Get involved in something you are really passionate about, it makes everything more worthwhile

Resources at UTEP

Thank you for the many ideas on resources available on campus that have helped you. These suggestions will help others as well, I'm sure.

1) Electronic databases such as ISI Web of Science and Pub Med are wonderful. Learn how to search effectively using these database tools and they can be very helpful. The librarians will teach you how.
2) Career Services will work with you on your resume.
3) Check the “Job Mine” website
4) Learn how to use RefWorks or EndNote to create literature databases for each of your research projects. Check the UTEP library website or Endnote’s site, http://www.endnote.com/ because if you are not using these tools in your writing, you are wasting a lot of time.
5) Going to the library to make copies of articles is inconvenient; not all articles have full-text online copies. The UT-TeleCampus digital library is a much better resource for online copies.
6) You have to pay for the interlibrary loan service, but it’s not too expensive. Just make sure you really need the article.
7) If you want to survey your class use Survey Monkey. The free version allows 10 questions and 100 responses and it’s easy to set up, http://www.surveymonkey.com/Home_Pricing.aspx
8) Mspace is a useful place to store documents you may need when you are away from home or campus.
9) Check into Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) and attend their conferences on preparing future faculty.
10) http://www.pubmed.gov/ is a helpful tool as are other niche sites within your discipline such as http://www.diabetes.org/ and others.
11) Don’t forget Google Scholar, Bing, and other discipline specific sites such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ to get started with your searches.
12) The UTEP Writing Center is a place you should definitely visit.
13) The Disabled Student Services Offices can be of great help, and can set you up with helpful software such as Dragon speech recognition software http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/
14) A few more databases: WorldCat (World Catalog), IIMP (International Index to Music Periodicals), Academic Search Complete, ProQuest, and JSTOR (Journal Storage). ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center), PsychInfo and Proquest for dissertations and theses.
15) The CETaL and ORSP workshops have been helpful, especially on how to use rubrics to grade more efficiently and effectively.
16) YouTube has a wealth of science-related instructional videos on topics such as micropipetting, cell cultures techniques, and others. Great tools to help students in lab sections.
17) Build and tap into your networks through attending seminars, workshops, meetings, visiting with colleagues and faculty in your area and outside.
18) Instructional Support Services can help with instructional technologies and supports “i-Peer” which allows students on teams to evaluate each other’s team work behavior anonymously
19) The UTEP-VPN login allows you to access your UTEP computer and resources from off-campus sites.
20) Goldmine has been a great resources to make registering and paying for classes online easy.
21) The UTEP license for Turnitin (turnitin.com) is helpful in allowing students to submit their papers to check for plagiarism before they turn it in for a grade.
22) You may also want to check into the support program Human Resources offers. You will be surprised. http://admin.utep.edu/Default.aspx?alias=admin.utep.edu/hr

Recommendations on Moving Your Research Projects Forward

I read very good suggestions in your blogs on how to get started with your research and keeping it on track. Below is the summary of your thoughts. My suggestion are to
1) visit with your professor(s) on a weekly basis;
2) Manage your time effectively and on a daily basis;
3) Learn how to use relevant databases, websites, and search engines effectively;
4) Learn to use RefWorks or EndNote to build your own database of articles.
5) Finally, and we have not talked about this much, adopt healthy liefstyle behaviors. Instead of going out to lunch, bring your own healthy sandwich and keep plugging along. Take an exercise break around mid-day for 30 min or so. It will keep you in much better spirits during the afternoon. Cook your own dinner on Sunday afternoon/evening. Freeze/refrigerate daily portions so you can just pop them in the microwave when you get home. This save you many hours over going out to eat or cooking each day, and you’ll like the food. It also saves you a ton of money. Stop drinking sodas, they only give you empty calories, a sugar/caffeine boost and then you crash. Drink tea instead.

Here are your suggestions

Blog 9 Summary: Research Success and Expectations
1) Early communication with advisors can be difficult. Going to your advisor with a plan and taking initiative may be one solution.
2) It’s important to have in-depth discussions with your advisor about your topic, but go prepared as best as possible. Narrow down your topics to a few that really appeal to you and you’re excited about, learn how to use databases and search engines well, and then read the relevant literature. Knowing what is relevant and what is not, can save you lots of time.
3) Set up a regular schedule of meetings with your advisors, preferably on a weekly basis especially if you are signed up for independent study, research project, or thesis/dissertation. Insist on it.
4) Get clarity on what is expected of you.
5) Daily planning and managing your time is critical to stay on track with your research. Congratulations.
6) Teaching and grading easily takes over; have to be careful in your time management and adopting efficient grading strategies.
7) Partnering with other grad students on research can be helpful
8) Make sure to live a healthy lifestyle: eat healthy and exercise. It really does help, you’ll be amazed at the amount of energy you gain.
9) Getting into research projects can be very rewarding and exciting: Discovery always is.
10) If you can get on a grant or be part of a group that applies for one, do it. It will be a helpful experience to go through that process. If the grant funds your thesis or dissertation research, even better.
11) Get started with research in your very first semester, even if it is just helping out a more senior graduate student. It would also have been helpful if you had been involved in research projects during your undergraduate years.
12) Apply for graduate scholarship and fellowship. They greatly benefit your resume/CV
13) Research usually takes more time than you think it will; it is easy to get pulled into non-productive directions as well. Keep your focus when looking for resources and don’t get distracted by other interesting topics.

Classroom Observations

Some of you attended the peer observation workshop I presented this semester. I explained in it why peer observation of teaching is important. On of the most important reasons is that your peers know things about teaching and the work that goes into the preparation of good teaching that students do not. Therefore peers are better equipped to observe those elements.

It is important to note that teaching is a very complex activity, the success of which is influenced by a large number of variables. To demonstrate successful teaching we cannot solely rely on the perceptions of our students, but have to show its impact from multiple perspectives using multiple, relevant measures. Student feedback is only one of those measures, even though their input is important because they are the ones doing the learning.

To know good teaching depends on experience, and the study of teaching and learning literature, Fortunatly, a large body of research exists from which "best practices" can be derived. Unfortunately, many faculty members are too busy with other responsbilities to engage in the study of teaching and learning. This is where centers for effective teaching and learning can play a critical role.

To class this blog I want to share the valuable comment I read in your blogs on classroom observations.
Blog 8 summary: Observations
1) Observations are effective in that you got to observe different methods of teaching; you can ignore the content and look at the actual teaching behaviors and actions.
2) Fascinating to watch student interaction with the teacher and their body language
3) Difficult to assess folks who just give a talk (lecture) to distribute valuable information [HM Comment: distributing information can be done on a pamphlet or in a book. What is the role of the person who distributes the information? Shouldn’t s/he do a bit more than rattling off a PPT and list of items to ensure participants in the session really do understand the important points? You know that we all “filter” information based on our own experiences and knowledge. If you want folks ‘to get it right” you probably have to do a bit more than simply give them the information].
4) Explaining tasks clearly at the beginning of the session is key to success for the students’ learning and the flow of the session.
5) The observation provides new ideas on teaching, especially active learning techniques.
6) Just because you gave a good lecture doesn’t mean the students actually understood the material.
7) Being observed really helped because of the constructive feedback received.
8) It was not clear initially how you could benefit from a peer observation, but the observation helped see what grabs students’ attention and things (mistakes) to be careful of.
9) Good teachers guide students in discovery rather than provide them with answers.
10) Observing a class is completely different from attending it as a student, because now you see the “finer points” of good teaching.
11) Received very practical feedback on classroom management
12) Teaching strategies have changed for the better over the last decades in a number of instances, but there are still stalwarts and traditionalist teachers who only deliver information.
13) Some people should not be teachers because they have no teaching skills and don’t understand the process.
14) Lectures results quickly in a loss of attention by the students.
15) Big classes are intimidating.

My Professional Development Plan

My Professional Development Plan

I have to be honest here. I never really put together a professional development plan. My plan was to work hard. I have to say that this approach has paid off, especially at UTEP, but it also left me wishing I had done things differently.

I still am painfully aware of how much a good mentor could have helped me early on in my career. My career path would likely have been completely different had I had the support I needed at that time. I scrambled to get publications and presentation and it did not matter whether my efforts were focused. I just worked hard to get those pubs out, which left me without focus and little expertise in any area.

A good development plan would have helped me lay out my path (especially important during the pre-tenure years) that I could have sustained after tenure. The lack of focus, not having developed a core research group of graduate students, and consequently a well-functioning lab, my research program did not amount to much. If I had to do it again, I would do it very differently. It's not use crying over spilled milk, therefore I now try to help young faculty establish a better career path early in their profession through the UTEP Collaborative Faculty Mentoring Program.

My professional development plan for the future is somewhat ill-defined. I have numerous goals related to the tasks in my portfolio as an Associate Provost that are important for UTEP. Maintaining the current mentoring program, growing CETaL and making sure its events help faculty, establishing a sustained leadership development program, and ensuring that our interim report to SACS is of high quality are foremost in my mind.

As many of you have commented, I am too busy taking care of business to be able to think where I want to go or achieve over the next 3-5 yrs. To be honest, a personal retreat and vacation would be nice about now to help me prioritize and set some goals.

From Your Personal Development Plan

I read your blogs on your personal development plans and distilled a few themes.
1) Create goals and put them in a schedule, a timeline, focused on achieving the tasks necessary to accomplish those goals
2) Stick to your schedule and complete the tasks needed to achieve your important goals first
3) Dedicate substantial quality time and effort to your most important goals
4) Update your current documents and maintain them in your electronic portfolio
5) Rewarding yourself for your accomplishments
6) Some of the things you have to do may not contribute to reaching your goals (like some of the elements covered in this course)
7) It’s difficult to think beyond one year and identify targets to work towards
8) It is difficult to create a plan for TA responsibilities because they change from semester to semester and even within one semester.
9) Thinking about all the uncertainties can be overwhelming, but you can handlge it by taking one step at a time.
10) Set regular meetings with your advisor to make sure your progress steadily towards graduation.
11) Collect essential information that will help you in your decision making processes.
12) Making a plan is difficult, but sticking to it is even more so.
13) Identifying the smaller tasks and steps needed to complete larger goals is even more difficult than identifying those goals.
14) The really difficult thing is to manage time effectively on an hour to hour basis.
15) Grading responsibilities are taking a toll on educational responsibilities, balancing all activities is difficult
16) Take concrete steps towards completing goals for graduation; Get an advisor, narrow down your topic of research.
17) The most difficult part is deciding on 3-yr (long term) goals, because they don’t align you’re your current education or you can’t see beyond the daily responsibilities that need your attention
a. Taking time to develop a plan to manage time is a waste of time. Focus on what needs to be done now and take things one semester at a time. The future will present itself.
b. No plan, just do what needs to be done now, but some organization will make life better
18) What does a professional development plan look like?

So what is your next step?
In your philosophy statements many of you identified what was important to you and what you would like to accomplish. Reflect on that again. Your values and beliefs can point you in the right direction. If you love teaching, for example, you may not want to consider a position at a research institute no matter how good you are at research. Your values can be your guides in determining your longer terms goals. Similarly, if you have longer term goals you’re passionate about, see whether your current activities will allow you to achieve them. If you perceive mismatches, you may want to adjust your plan.

Constructing a Teaching Philosophy

Teaching Philosophies

Writing a clear and coherent teaching philosophy is not an easy task. It requires intense self-examination and reflection focused on your most sincere beliefs and values about teaching and learning. That process takes time and a lot of effort.

As you know by now, there are a number of helpful documents, and I have shared a few with you that can help you get started. You can find copies of these materials on the course’s Blackboard site and on the CETaL website at http://cetalweb.utep.edu/home under resources.

I developed my teaching philosophy a number of years ago, and to be honest, I haven’t looked at it in a while. That means that the old version is likely hopelessly out of date…or it may surprise me. So I looked for it and here is the most recent version from 2006. It was part of my professional statement as a department chair.

“As a teacher it is my duty and responsibility to help students gain the skills and knowledge necessary to become independent learners, who can successfully navigate an increasingly complex society, and take leadership responsibilities for their personal lives, their family, as well in larger contexts. Through the application of collaborative teaching strategies in my classes, I have been able to more actively engage students and help them gain confidence in their abilities to learn independently and socially (i.e. in small groups). The learning and study strategies I weave into my course reportedly have helped them perform better in courses they took afterwards. I have found students to be more engaged and interested in their own learning when they are given personal responsibility and are held accountable for their actions. They become less dependent on the instructor and participate more in the course activities. I am convinced that active, cooperative learning strategies in the classroom should no longer be an option. These are strategies all instructors need to employ in their classrooms. The evidence is clear: cooperative learning effectively employed is far superior to any other teaching strategy. As a department chair, I encouraged faculty to open their classrooms to peer visits and mentoring to enhance their personal teaching strategies and incorporate models of cooperative and active learning. Teaching and learning are the reasons why universities exist, and preparing future leaders through education is our primary purpose and legacy. In order to serve our students best towards that goal, we should adopt the most effective strategies, even if this requires continuing education and additional effort”.

Based on the documents and criteria I shared with you, I need to take some time and revise this version. Many of the ones you wrote are much better than my version. I promise I will do so, but I don’t know when that will happen.

Compilation of Your Grading Strategies

After having read your blogs on grading, I compiled the issues you presented and maybe some solutions you may apply. I will send you a rubric template that may give you some ideas and a
few internet links.


Here are the things I learned from you with some suggestions from me.

1. If you have to grade work by 200 students you will feel overwhelmed and you need to ask your fellow TAs and the professor of the class what strategies they propose you use. Don't try to figure it out on your own and make the same mistakes all those other people made. Ask questions.
2. Many of you use rubrics and you find that your grading of lab reports is still subjective. Yes there is a subjective element to a rubric. However, if the criteria and standards are clearly written with no ambiguity, both the students and you should know exactly what good performance looks like. The rubric template puts the standards in terms of beginning, developing, accomplished, and exemplary. If you set your rubric up like this, you can help students identify where their work fits and show them what they need to do to move to a higher level of performance. This is easier to interpret and use than a rubric than contains no more than a check table ranging from "poor" to "excellent" where the different standards are poorly or not at all described. A well written rubric can also help multiple people grade similarly on the criteria and standards although you may need some training to "get on the same page" and apply the criteria and standards in the same way. The professor teaching the class should help you with this. Once you get used to using the rubric grading will go much faster.
3. When you use a rubric, and you grade a lab report or paper, you should look for the elements spelled out in the rubric in the report or paper. Focus your attention on finding just those elements and ignore the superfluous stuff. You do not have to read every word the students write. In other words, your reading of their work has to become a focused search of how well their work matches the criteria and standards described in the rubric. Understand the rubric in depth and know what you are looking for in the students' work. This will speed up your grading.
4. Using the rubric correctly and consistently will also make your grading fair. You also don't need to see the name of the student to grade their work. If you are afraid your grading will be biased, put sticky notes over the student names before you start grading and shuffle to pile of papers.
5. To provide feedback you should provide the students with a copy of the completed rubric. If the standards for the various criteria are clearly and unambiguously described, circling that "box" in the rubric let's the student know what performance level they achieved and what they need to do next to get to the higher level. You can still provide general feedback about the average performance in the class when you return their work. Address the criteria on which the average performance was poor and let the entire class know what they need to do to perform better. Point to the requirements for the next performance level (standard) in the rubric.
6. The standards described in the rubric provide the basis for the feedback you can provide the students. If you are consistent in applying the rubric you can quickly identify the students that completely missed the boat, contact them individually, and ask what went wrong. Some of you wrote that you do this already. Applying the rubric consistently really help with this. Believe me, most students will greatly appreciate it when you do this and be better motivated to improve on the next assignment. This is what teaching is about; helping student learn and perform at a higher level.
7. If you use a rubric, you can almost eliminate the comments you would normally write on a paper. If you leave some space at the bottom of the rubric sheet, you can write comments there.
8. Just like having your own annotation system for reading, you can also develop an annotation systems for commenting on a paper. Develop symbols (share their meaning with your students) that you use to mark up a paper and that can serve to point out problems in their work. This will reduce the amount of writing you have to do.
   Have students submit electronic versions only. Reviewing a paper electronically can be faster than doing it by hand because almost all of us type faster than we can write and it will be legible. The "Tracking" tool in MS-word under the "Review" tab is quite powerful and you can comment on items as well
9. If you use Multiple Choice (MC) quizzes, see if you can set them up on Blackboard. The automatic grading feature will make life so much easier. There are numerous faculty members who have figured out how to use the Blackboard quiz feature effectively for student learning. To learn more about this attend the September 23, 2009 workshop. See http://cetalweb.utep.edu/home/ events page and registration.
   If you use scantrons for quizzes find a scantron machine so you don't have to hand score hundreds of them. There is no need for wasting your time that way.
   Some of you ask students to write journals and use guidelines. Journaling and reflections can be very helpful in learning, but you do need to specify what you expect them to write about so that your expectations are clear to the students.
10. Getting students to prepare for an assignment is a challenge but there are ways to do it. Check with your faculty member, but the Blackboard quiz module is a great tool for this.
    Some of you worried about the grade distribution. When grading students' work, you have to discriminate between those who did excellent work and those who did not. Not doing so makes education a farce. Besides, the students know who did good work and who did not, so your assessment of their work should discriminate. If you don't, you are not being fair and you are not helping the students in their education. To improve their performance level you have to be honest with them and not let them falsely believe they are doing fine. That false sense of competency you are giving them will come to haunt them in the future.
    Item 14 also related to being lenient versus being strict. That is really not the issue. The question is what is your most honest assessment of their performance. If it's poor they need to know it is poor; not "oh, for now it's o.k." That is not the way to help our students do better. Tell them what they did not do well and give them error-correction feedback that allows them to do better the next time. You can also allow them to correct their work based on your feedback and resubmit it (if the faculty member you're working for allows it).
11. Be persistent in asking for high quality work, and grade that work consistently. If a student did well on the first couple assignments but dropped the ball on a later one, grade that performance truthfully and don't assume that "she knows how to do this" and give a higher grade.
12. Publish your rubric and grading criteria to the students in advance so they know what is expected of them. This should not be secret. Knowing this allows them to prepare will for the work and focuses your feedback on the things that count.
13. In general, when you provide feedback try to ensure that the students do something with it. Ask them to decide what they will do different next time and have them write those decisions down. You can then ask them to look back at what they wrote and let them assess how well they stayed with their own decisions. Too often we assume that students will do this automatically. They do not.
14. Give students links to online resources that can help them do better. There is a lot out there so pick and choose what you believe may be best, and let them know how they can use it, and what they are not allowed to do with it.
15. Finally, looking at your learning styles blogs it appears that some of you are thinking that learning styles determine learning. That is not necessarily the case. Learning styles reflect the preferred ways in which people process information. For example, I am a visual learning which means I like to learn from visual images much more than I like to learn from reading text. That does not mean I cannot learn from text, but I pick things up quicker when I see it done. You cannot possibly satisfy all the variations in learning styles you will have in your classroom. What you can do is vary your delivery of information. Use numerous combinations of text, graphics, multimedia, animations, etc. That also keeps the presentations interesting from a student's perspective and increase motivation to learn. More important than the delivery mode of information is that you engage the students in doing something with that information.
    

This is a long list and I hope it will help you in your grading responsibilities. Thanks for your blog posts, they helped my write mine.
HM~

Revising your course

When you teach class/lab, keep a log of what happened as you had students complete the learning activities.

How did they react during the introduction and the execution of the activity? Did they learn from the activities? How did you find out that they did? Did you use: 1-min paper, muddiest point, application card, etc? What did you learn from those in-class/lab assessments?

Then write notes on what you would do differently in the future. I usually keep a second file of the course materials in which I type comments for revision or revise the activities right after class, while your thoughts and ideas are still in your mind. This way your revised class is done by the time this semester ends and you don't have to spend your vacation revising your course. All you have to do is look at the course evaluations to see if those offer any new information, but if you have been applying continuous course assessments and your own course evaluations you should have all the useful information you need for revisions by the end of the semester.

The trouble with instructional technology

Instructional technology poses a definite challenge. I think we are finding that out. Some of us have struggled with creating the Google and Blog accounts, as well as receiving the invitation to the Google Doc.

When I first started looking into using these tools that seemed promising in helping the learning process it all seemed so easy. I gues that's what happens when you believe the marketing folks. As usual, the devil is in the details. So we find ourselves not being able to access Blackboard despite multiple tries and attempts to work around the problem. On a side note, there are several complicating factors 1) the university is switching from WebCT to Blackboard and the information was not communicated to the faculty effectively despite multiple attempts to inform the departments (emails are often not forwarded to the person that need them; let that be a lesson); 2) in the classroom MS-Explorer messed up Blackboard so I could not see the class roll at all. It worked in my office and the techies suggested I use Firefox because it has fewer problems. You would expect that the Blackboard folks had done something about these issues by now.

Because faculty were not informed appropriately they are now bombarding the tech folks with questions and problems that they would have addressed had the communication channels worked better. Clearly, all the issues with Blackboard have not been resolved yet. The good news is that folks are working on it. In the mean we'll have to work around it.

The technology glitches are taking up an enormous amount of my time (I have been trying to deal with those for over 2 hours now) that has nothing to do with the substance of the class, and some of the problems are out of my hands. This is very frustrating.

Despite all that, today was an excellent session from my perspective.
I'll reflect later about my organizational activities behind the scenes.

Jumping ahead to day one of the seminar

All the preparation ended and execution began. It actually worked out quite well from my point of view. As with any project your plan and plan to make sure everything is in place but there is always uncertainty. How will it go? Will I be able to execute my plan, or will there be unforeseen events that will derail everything? Often things do pop up you did not plan for, so flexibility is a necessity. In Holland during my undergraduate degree we were required to create two lesson plans whenever we planned an outdoor activity, because the likelyhood of getting rained out was always present. So plan with contingencies in mind.

For example, I have invited four people for your panel on the first day of class. Only Judith and Cecilia were there. I have not heard from the other two people and assume they are ok. Hopefully nothing bad happened. Despite their absence, I think we had a good session. Regrettably, you did not get to hear the thoughts of the other panelists.

I was "psyched" to use an outdated term. I thought you all brought great energy to the seminar and contributed many good ideas. You show commitment to teaching and learning by registering for this experience and I appreciate that.

I will now go home and read your evaluations, process them, and decide what I could do different the next time we do this.

See you tomorrow.
HM

When to do the thinking

Another issue in designing courses is your own energy level and focus. Generally I do my best thinking in the morning in a relatively quiet and undisturbed place like my home office, but I can work in my work office as well as long as I keep the door closed and email turned off.

I have found that if I exercise over the lunch hour my mind is sharper in the afternoon than if I do not take a break. When the biorhythm dips in the afternoon I have to compensate by physical activity. Caffeine only goes so far. I also find that after dinner I usually have some clarity of thought and can focus quite well. I usually stop around 9:30 to relax before going to sleep.

The Hardest and most time consuming part: What are the best learning activities for this course?

Each one of the learning activities is a creative and research project in itself. With sufficient resources it can take me 2-6 hours to develop a learning activity that may take 30 min or less in class.

I have found that I constantly need to remind myself not to get caught up in minute details that are mostly surface features of the learning activity, and focus on the "heart" of the activity; the part that would help students learn. It’s more important to focus on the essence of the learning activity and anticipate what kind of thinking/learning it my induce and spend most time on developing it. That requires keeping the learning outcome right next to you and referring back to it frequently to see whether the essence of the learning activity addresses that learning outcome. Once you have thought that through you can start working on the class management procedures, and the documents and supplies necessary to conduct the activity.

Once you have a draft, have a colleague and a student look at it and see if what you created makes sense to them. You may have it clear in your mind, but when writing it down left some gaps in the instructions/explanations or made incorrect assumptions your peer or the students can identify for you.

Developing the Learning Outcomes for GRAD 6100

Developing appropriate learning outcomes (LO) for GRAD 6100 was important, because of the key role this seminar can play in the future of teaching assistants’ careers at UTEP and beyond. While attention to training graduate students to teach has improved substantially in recent years, many of them, especially PhD students, still receive little formal training in teaching and learning during their graduate studies despite the fact that a large majority of them become university faculty whose duties include teaching. Fortunately, many of the top universities understood the role of TAs and now have well-established TA training programs that are often required, because of the benefits for the TAs and the students they teach.

Formulating the learning outcomes was an important task because these statements would dictate how the class would be structured and what the students would get out of it.
I had taught an elective class for doctoral students in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Health Sciences on course design and thought I would be able to apply that design to this seminar. However, a discussion with colleagues and the responses of a large group of graduate students to a needs survey related to teaching and learning showed that design would not work.

I tapped into my network of colleagues and friends at other universities to learn about the programs they had develop, in particular UT San Antonio, UT Austin, and SUNY Albany, and I visited websites of programs at universities such as Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford. There are many sources of information and excellent websites available to study. That is fortunate, but also a bit of a challenge, because the temptation to just copy a program that has been around for a while is great. Copying is fraught with many dangers, not least of which that you'll create a program may not fit well at UTEP.

The survey of our UTEP graduate students was a key element in developing the learning outcomes. Their expression of what they would like to see in a seminar on teaching was important. This information in combination with various texts on successful teaching such as McKeachie’s classic book, and Nilson’s text, it became clear what this seminar should cover. Given the constraints and context of the seminar, the following learning outcomes were adopted (written in format suggested by Fink, 2003).

"A person can be well prepared to teach in higher education if they can DO the following:
1. Present a thoughtful philosophy of teaching, because it will be your compass that provides coherence and direction for your actions.
2. Develop basic skills such as (in this class you will practice these at various levels):
a. Writing relevant, clear, and measurable learning outcomes.
b. Designing relevant and authentic learning experiences for individuals and groups.
c. Assessing different kinds of student learning and the impact of your courses; use assessment and reflection to continuously improve teaching.
d. Dealing with different personalities and difficult people in a positive and effective manner.
e. Knowing how to find and use helpful resources available at the university.
f. Using information technology tools effectively to support your teaching and research.
g. Identify funding resources to support your work.
h. Identify the assumptions, role, scope, and responsibilities associated with positions in higher education.

3. Using reflection and discussion to create a professional development plan that integrates teaching and research in a coherent package so the activities support each other rather than distract, in order to direct continuous growth as a professional.

4. Work effectively as a leader and team member towards positive change and improvements in your teaching for yourself and others.

One of the key criteria of a LO is that you can assess students' performance on it. I needed to ask the question “Can I identify a clear way to find out whether the students have achieved the LO?” and can we do it justice in the time we have with the resources available? For example, how will I know that each student can “Build a sophisticated philosophy of teaching, research, and service…?” and can they achieve that successfully within the time and resource constraints. It is not fair to set high goals that cannot realistically be met in the course.

Selecting or creating documents for class

This is another activitiy that takes a lot of time.

Doing the research to identify sources and creating different background materials for learning activities is no less demanding than a literature review. It is a time consuming and tedious process, so if there is material out there that others will allow you to use, do so and avoid reinventing the wheel! By all means, adjust the material to fit your needs, but avoid creating it from scratch whenever possible. There is already so much material on the internet you can use that is free.

Learning Outcomes: The Driving Force

Learning outcomes have received much attention in the last decade or so. The public wants to be assured that the courses students pay hard earned money for help them achieve something valuable and ultimately help them obtain a good job. Legislatures have pushed accreditation agencies to demand assessment of outcomes at universities they accredit. UTEP must submit its 5 yr interim report ot its accrediting agency in 2011 and show evidence that all academic programs assess the effectiveness of their curricula in helping student achieve the stated Program Learning Outcomes (PLO).

In the context of this “bigger picture” you can see the roles of individual classes more clearly. If accreditation agencies (the Southern Association for Colleges and Schools: SACS is the agency that accredits UTEP) are demanding accountability of academic programs, the programs must hold faculty and instructional staff accountable for what they do in the classroom. In this context, every single faculty member must ensure that the content, learning activities, and assessments in his/her class are directly contributing to the program’s learning outcomes. No longer can departments and programs allow individual instructors to determine what they will teach in their courses. Each course has to help students achieve the PLOs and must be continually assessed on its effectiveness in doing so. On an annual basis, the faculty must review the data gathered on student performance to determine where improvements are needed in the curriculum to better meet their PLOs. We are now required to show evidence that we are really doing what we say we do. The “trust us, we’re doing our job” argument is no longer accepted.

In this context, faculty must think carefully about what it is that students should be able to do at the end of their course. To determine what those outcomes are, faculty members should understand the PLOs, and the place of their course in the curriculum. Ideally, the faculty in a department should collectively discuss the learning outcomes for each class, ensure these are aligned with the PLOs, and decide which PLOs are covered in which class. Each individual faculty member then has the opportunity to decide how to best help students achieve these outcomes in his/her class.

Determining what the learning outcomes should be for GRAD 6100 was a bit different from the process described above. I relied on conversations with faculty developers at other universities, books by the lead thinkers in teaching and learning, consults with the graduate school, a survey the graduate students in Spring 2009, and my own experiences, to determine what the needs were and what the students should gain from this class to prepare them well for a teaching position in higher education. This seminar cannot cover all the aspects of teaching and learning, we have academic programs that try to do that, nor be everything to everybody. It can only offer general teaching and learning principles that the participants must translate into the specific teaching actions befitting the culture of their disciplines and the constraints placed upon their course through its situational factors (see Fink, 2003).

Planning backwards

Planning backwards is likely the most important principle in course design. After you have identified the situational factors that define the context for your course (see Fink, 2003) you need to decide what the learning outcomes (goals) are for the class. You need to clearly articulate what the students should know and be able to do after they complete your course in preparation for their next course in the curriculum or their professional tasks. The principle of planning backwards speaks to me because of my background in athletics.

As a coach in international and NCAA Division I gymnastics, planning backwards was required practice if you wanted to develop an effective training plan for the athletes. If you wanted to win a championship you had to sequence your practices such that your gymnasts would learn the physical skills and gain the mental confidence and attitude necessary to accomplish that feat. Therefore, you built your practices from easy to difficult, slow to fast, etc, but in a backwards fashion. It should be no different in any learning situation, but in higher education few courses are designed with this principle in mind. Developing and sequencing learning activities from simple to complex across a semester takes quite a bit of thought, and many instructors rely on textbook authors to take care of sequencing materials. .

Let me refer back to athletics one more time. Backwards planning is fully focused on the athletes, their physical and mental health and continual progress to peak performance. Competition, success, glory, fame, and sometimes lots of money, are strong motivators to work hard on the planning process and "get it right." Clearly, on the academic side of higher education we don't have these strong motivators, but we are responsible for preparing many young people for the next course in their curriculum, and the challenges of life and their profession. Something that is in the end much more important than winning a trophy. Therefore thougtful development of learning goals and meticulous backwards planning are necessary components of course development.

Getting started with course development

Every project starts with an intent. This one was no different. I consider the design of a new course a project. In the old days my approach to designing a course was to select a textbook that came with overheads (nowadays that is either a CD or a webpage with PowerPoint files and a bank of test questions) and I was done. I have to admit, that I too took the road of least resistance and thought that I was solely responsible for transmitting information to the students. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to, because that had been modeled to me my entire life in education. Even in my first year as a faculty member, I was told to sit in on a class taught by a "master teacher" who portayed just that model.

But designing a learning-centered course is much more than picking a textbook for convenience. I intended to develop a course for graduate students that would help them learn more about teaching and develop a "reference of correctness" about teaching and learning that was more than "teaching = delivering information." In other words, I wanted this course to help Teaching Assistants realize that good teaching is not just lecturing by the "sage on the stage" who then leaves the students to their own devices to figure out what all that information really means.

Bill McKeachie suggest to start the development of a course at least 3 months prior to teaching it. I started developing this one towards the end of the spring semester 2009, as it would be taught in the Fall of 2009.

As a starting point I used a class I taught on teaching and course design for doctoral students in the College of Health Sciences during the previous two fall semesters. I had been succesful and I thought I could roll that course over into a seminar for our teaching assistants. I was wrong!


From early comments on the draft syllabus I shared with my collaborators, it was clear that my focus was too much on course design and the theories behind teaching and learning. Masters and new PhD teaching assistants, especially those who have not taught before, clearly have very different concerns. A survey of their needs and personal communications made very clear. I had to change my approach significantly, and started focusing on the basic elements of teaching such as developing a lesson plan, public speaking skills, starting a discussion and facilitating it, basic class management strategies, etc.


I reread some of the classic books on teaching such as McKeachie's Teaching Tips, and Linda Nilson's Teaching at its Best, and reflected on my own experiences and strategies of 22 years in higher education.


Let me digress for a moment and tell you a bit about my learning styles, because they help explain how I go about conqueringt the challenge of designing a course. According to the Felder and Soloman Index of Learning Styles my prefered learning styles are Active, Sensing, Visual, and Global. In other words, I focus on the big picture, then jump in, and muddle around with stuff before I develop a detailed structure. It probably drives others crazy, because in the early phases I change things a lot and that happened in this case as well.

Focusing on the big picture first, I started developing the body of the syllabus. That was the easy part, because after my discussions with the other folks I was pretty clear on what the course needed to accomplish. Using the model developed by Dee Fink (2003) I laid out the basic elements of the course based on what I believed the students needed to be able to DO after they completed the learning experiences I would present to them in this course.

Finally, developing a course is very much a research project, so I tapped into the resources available to develop the most appropriate outcomes and the best possible learning experiences for the students. Having never taught this type of course, my work was based on one big hypothesis: "Based on my studies I think this will work, but I will have to conduct the experiment to see if it does."

Continued in the next episode :)

The Importance of Learning How to Teach

Training of graduate teaching assistants has always been a concern at UTEP. In the past the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning (CETaL) offered a series of workshops that helped TAs prepare for their teaching duties. Because of turnover in staff in the center and in the graduate school, TA training has recently not received the attention it deserves. In the spring of 2009 I decided to form a working group with the Dean of the Graduate School and her staff to develop a teaching seminar for Graduate Teaching Assistants because (1) we have an obligation to prepare graduate students, especially PhD students, for a career in higher education as teachers, and (2) we need to develop a learning-centered culture that focuses on teaching students and not solely delivering content.

The purpose of seminar is to further develop the basic skills, knowledge and attitudes of graduate teaching assistants in preparation for their role as teaching professionals in higher education. The seminar aims to help them gain the confidence needed to conquer the challenges they will face in teaching and research, with an emphasis on teaching. The seminar will also help students develop such skills as writing relevant, clear, and measurable learning outcomes; designing powerful, relevant, and authentic learning experiences for individuals and groups; assess different kinds of student learning; use assessment and reflection to continuously improve teaching; dealing with different personalities and difficult people in a positive and effective manner; and creating longer term teaching and research development plans, among others.

Times have changed and we cannot afford to continue the traditional approach of lecturing, i.e. distributing information, with little concern about how students process that information, and leaving them to their own devices in trying to make sense of it all. Teaching requires more than repeating what is already in the textbook or other materials for the class. We have an obligation to teach student how we think in our discipline and how to apply effective problem solving strategies that will lead to innovative solutions to the many challenges we face as a society. This will not happen if we keep asking students to simple memorize what we said or repeat procedures we showed them.

In this blog I will document the strategy I used, the work completed, and the time it took to develop this course. I do have to admit that I am reconstructing the sequence of events because I started this blog after the fact.