OPID's Faculty College 2004

Improving Teaching Through Scholarly Inquiry into Student Learning
William Cerbin

This seminar is for instructors who want to design a scholarly project that focuses on teaching and learning in your own classrooms. The goals of the seminar are to help you develop:
• a research focus related to student learning in your classes
• classroom inquiry strategies and tools for investigating student learning
• a plan to implement the investigation in your class

This is not a seminar on research methods in higher education. Instead it addresses how to do systematic, disciplined classroom inquiry to investigate questions about student learning that matter to you. In the seminar you will design a project that focuses on how to improve student learning as it relates to specific contexts and learning problems. For example, projects might investigate how to improve student learning with respect to a significant course assignment you use, or focus on a common learning problem in your class (e.g., why students have trouble understanding an important concept in your field).

Instructors who register for this seminar will be asked to bring specific course materials to Faculty College. This request will be emailed to participants in May. Participants will also have the opportunity to participate in post-seminar online discussions about their projects during summer 2004.

The seminar is intended for instructors who have little formal training in classroom inquiry, but experienced classroom researchers are welcome to participate.

Bill Cerbin is Professor of Psychology and Assistant to the Provost at UW-La Crosse. His scholarship of teaching focuses on how students develop deep understanding of important subject matter, and on how faculty can learn to do scholarly inquiry in the classroom. In 1998-99 and in 2003-04 he was named a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Currently, he directs the UW-La Crosse Lesson Study Project in which instructors are investigating student learning in introductory classes in their disciplines (http://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/)

Teaching & Learning 101: What Every College Teacher Should Know
Greg Valde

What should every college teacher know about how students learn?
And what should we all know about how to teach?
Are there basic concepts and findings in educational theory and research that might inform our work?

Do you want to know how your students think?
Have you always wondered about developmental epistemology?
Or the 3 basic principles of human memory?
Or maybe Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives?
Or a taxonomy of affective objectives?
Certainly you’ve been searching for the seven steps in effective traditional instruction?
Or yearned for research-based alternatives to traditional instruction?
Or maybe you would you just like to be able to use the word constructivism in a coherent sentence?

These topics and questions will be explored in this interactive and entertaining workshop. A variety of basic concepts and research findings about teaching and learning will be presented and discussed. There will be plenty of opportunity for questions and dialogue – as well as the opportunity to begin to apply some of these ideas to your teaching.

Greg Valde is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and director of the Teaching Scholars Program at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. At UW-W he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the psychological foundations of education. The UW-W Teaching Scholars Program identifies a small group of faculty each year for participation in an intensive teaching and learning experience. The program involves a seminar, attendance at workshops and conferences, peer partnerships and the completion of a scholarship of teaching project. Greg is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the College of Education Teaching Award and the university W.P. Roseman Excellence in Teaching Award. His most recently published works focus on the development of excellence in college teaching.

Want Your Students to Learn More? New Ideaqs for Designing Significant Learning into Your Courses
Dee Fink

Most college teachers would like their courses to be an experience in which their students achieve some kind of significant learning that lasts. But we feel frustrated and uncertain about how to get that to happen, for more students, more of the time.

In this workshop, we will:
• Examine the place of instructional design in the “big picture” of teaching,
• Take a close look at what each of us really wants our students to learn, and
• Then systematically work through a new model of instructional design that will enable us to “design high quality learning into our courses.”

The reaction of most teachers to this new model, Integrated Course Design, is quite enthusiastic, for two reasons. It shows them why much of what they are currently doing is good, but it also identifies new and different things they can do that will make their teaching even better.

Dee Fink has served as the founding director of the Instructional Development Program at the University of Oklahoma since 1979. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1976, and then accepted an academic appointment in the departments of Geography and Education at Oklahoma. He is a nationally recognized expert on various aspects of college teaching, and has recently published a book on instructional design, “Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses” (Jossey-Bass, 2003). In 2002 he became President-Elect of the Professional and Organizational Development [POD] Network in Higher Education, the largest national organization for faculty development in the United States. His website

Technology What is it Good For?
Sherry Lee Linkon

IThis workshop will debunk some common myths about classroom technology, identify some of the benefits it offers, and explore strategies for making the most effective, efficient use of technology to improve student learning. The sessions will combine presentation, discussion, hands-on experience, reflection, and strategic planning. We’ll consider ideas about the connection (and disconnection) between how people learn and how technology works. Participants will test-drive and reflect on examples developed by scholars in the Visible Knowledge Project, a 6-year-long national grant investigating the influence of classroom technology on student learning in humanities courses.

Sherry Lee Linkon is a professor of English, Coordinator of American Studies, and Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. Her research interests include women in nineteenth-century America, Jewish-American women writers, popular culture, working-class studies, and students’ learning in interdisciplinary courses. She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 1999 and has twice received the Distinguished Professor Award for Scholarship from YSU. In 2003, she was named Ohio Professor of the Year. Her book Teaching Working Class (University of Massachusetts, 1999) was named one of the ten best academic books of the 1990s by the readers of Lingua Franca magazine. Along with John Russo, she published a book about work and community in Youngstown, Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown (University Press of Kansas, 2002) and has edited a forthcoming collection, New Working-Class Studies (Cornell UP, 2004).