Reaction to Readings (Blog #3)

This weeks readings were from McKeachie's Teaching Tips. The chapters focused on reading as active learning, facilitating discussions, and effective lecturing. One think I thought was most useful in this weeks reading was the research information the author provided. Each chapter had empirical research either supporting or criticizing the concepts being discussed. This is useful (and interesting) because as a teacher, without this behind the scenes information, you may continue to use methods that have been shown to be ineffective or may miss out on new and improved ways of engaging students. Some examples of research results that McKeachie shared are as follows:

1. "Research shows that most material covered [in lecture] does not get into the students' notes or memory."

2. "Experimental evidence is accumulating to indicate that a certain degree of surprise or uncertainty arouses curiosity, a basic motive for learning."

3. "...found that teachers who used interpretation questions produced gains in student comprehension."

4. "...have shown that developmental discussion techniques improve the quality of decisions compared with freer, more nondirective discussion methods."

Although each of these, among the many others included in the reading, provide information to be learned, new teaching techniques, and suggested alterations in some classroom methods, I did not agree with all of them. Even though the text cites research stating how discussion is superior to lecture, I feel it is important to first ensure basic comprehension and knowledge of the material before an effective discussion can even take place. Therefore I feel lecture is an essential part of the learning process, not to be replaced solely by discussion. I think it would be most beneficial to implement one lecture day and one discussion day a week, or to include partial lecture for half the class period and the remainder be discussion of the material. Overall however, I felt the research results included in the reading were the most useful because future teachers can look at these findings and utilize them (structured discussion preferred over freer methods, interpretation questions rather than content ones, etc.)

As I stated in my Blog #2, I really feel my field, psychology, would really benefit from implementing more discussion and active learning methods of teaching. In addition, the ideas behind encouraging students to read could also be highly useful when implemented in my field. My experiences with the majority of my undergraduate (emphasis on this rather than graduate!) psychology classes is that the reading isn't overly important. What students are tested on, of course still in my experience, was what was lectured (most of this was from the book anyways), so reading the book was unnecessary in the eyes of the students. Since the field is made of a wide variety of opinions, theories, and ideas, it would be more beneficial for professors teaching psychology to implement readings from a wide variety of sources and discussion to integrate and evaluate the ideas.

There were many ideas in this weeks readings that I hope to implement in my own teaching:

1. First I was intrigued by the suggestion of providing study questions to guide student readings and to ensure that the questions that are provided are higher level (not focusing just on content but also ideas). However, I do stand behind the idea that it is the students responsibility to take initiative and read the material, so I would not make these questions mandatory or worth any percent of the final grade. I feel by making them mandatory, I'm making my students read, and like I said, the students don't have to read, its their responsibility to their education and their grade in the class. I would implement these questions in a way that either they would be worth extra credit, facilitate discussion on discussion class days, and I also am playing with the idea of writing three or four study guide questions for the reading and picking one from each to include on the test. I say playing because part of me would want to not inform the students of this and have them learn for themselves, reinforcing those who read and did the questions, but part of me feels this is also bordering on making the students read and not encouraging them to read. I remain unsure of exactly how I would implement the study questions, but I know somehow it will be done. I'm leaning towards combining some of the methods, mixing how I would utilize these questions depending on the class day. Sometimes they would be worth extra credit, sometimes if it is a discussion day they would serve to facilitate discussion, etc.


2. Second, I feel the suggestion of breaking the discussion down into part would be very helpful in facilitating student response. I would implement this by first asking the students what we know about the question, problem, or topic. I would write these on the board for visual reference during the actual discussion. Next, I would pose the question what do we not know. The responses to this question would guide the discussion and students would be able to use points from what we do know that we discussed earlier when answering some of the what do we not know discussions.


3. Third, I would use socratic questioning! For a clinical psychology graduate student who pracitces therapy techniques on a daily basis in class and at an internship, socratic questioning is known to be important and effective (and in the thearpy setting it is almost second nature) I hope to use this practice in the classroom setting as well.


4. Fourth, I like the suggestion of having students write out their answers to discussion questions I pose first in order to encourage talking and coherent ideas. Although, part of the reason I liked this idea was the way it fit so well with the suggestion of study questions to guide the reading. I would like to implement both of these in combination. The study guide questions could serve as discussion facilitators on discussion class days.


5. Lastly, the text stated that professors should encourage students to take fewer notes, writing only what is important. I would implement this suggestion into my own teaching, only in a slightly different way. I think it would be beneficial to post a general outline of the lecture prior to class. I would encourage students to print it out before class and let the outline help guide note taking while both reading and sitting in lecture. Students could use the outline to fill in the gaps when writing notes. I think this would speed up note taking on the students side of things and would also be beneficial for organizing the lecture on the professor side of things.

There were a few suggestions I feel I would NOT implement into my teaching in the future. Firstly, I despise the idea of audio taping and playing back the discussion to the class as well as having class observers note and comment on the discussion. I feel the students would be discouraged from talking when they know they are on tape and will have to listen to it again (fear of embarrassment hightened!) and I think they might feel judged if there are observers. These suggestions do not spell out increased classroom participation to me, but thats just my opinion. I also never liked the idea of stating during a lecture "this will be on the test" in order to capture students attention. I feel the students would gather from this statement that oh yes this is important and would maybe get the idea that not everything in the lecture is important or will listen only for that statement. I feel that if the information is not important enough to even possibly be on the test or just isn't important to the class objectives, why is the professor lecturing on it? Any information I am lecturing on, I want the students to be learning. I also feel that telling them what will be on the test is going to far in "helping" them. Students should be responsible for some of their learning (not all, I do think professors are there to help facilitate their learning, just this is a little much for me).

Here are some helpful links:

Book: The art of lecturing: a practical guide to successful university lectures. In particular the section on Common Mistakes that Turn Good Lectures into Disasters.

The Center for Instructional Development and Research's Teaching and Learning Bulletins:

1. More and Better Class Participation
2. What Helps Students Learn
3. Helping Students Read Well