Five Minute University - NOT what the best teachers do

In contrast to what the Best College Teachers seek to do, here's a little comic relief, courtesy of Father Guido Sarducci.

Sadly, it is funny because people can relate. Granted, he is using hyperbole (college was also about the experience, right?) but unless we seek to create significant learning experiences which result in changed thinking and changed behavior, our teaching will be as useful as those experiences and lack of true learning that Father Guido is responding to.

"Careful and sophisticated thinking" required

My thoughts are interrelating with other materials I have recently read and heard..... such as from 

Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, which acknowledges how our minds and interaction have changed with the changing technologies and suggests ways of handling it, including the important of reflective thought. This line of thinking is also heard from MIT professor Sherry Turkle, sociologist, psychologist and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.  I recently watched a presentation she gave on the topic of her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. In that presentation, she suggests that instructors should focus first on encouraging reflection THEN collaborative work. She is observing a demise of reflective thought, which is that level of thought Ken Bain suggests is necessary to be an effective instructor. There is no "quick fix", nor is there, to put it in the current vernacular, "an app for that" to be one of the "best instructors". 

I may wish to be able to read a book like What the Best College Teachers Do and come away with a set of methods to use but Bain states clearly in the first chapter that such is not possible. There are underlying principles which have been drawn out from this study, but not easy tasks to memorize and add to the teacher toolbelt. In other words.... instructors must apply the same critical and reflective thinking when reading this book that they should be guiding their students through in their classes.

How useful are student ratings?

The book discusses the role of student evaluation of courses/instructors and points out the ineffectiveness of many questions commonly on course evaluation forms. Instead of asking students if the instructor was "engaging", which slants towards charismatic lecturers who many or may not be teaching well, the idea of seeking to assess what knowledge the students have gained from the course is more effective.

This causes me to re-think how I word evaluations for my training sessions. The book supports that student evals are important, but we should asked if the class or session "helped or encouraged them to learn" (p. 13) I like the example drawn from some Northwestern and Vanderbilt student rating forms:

• "Rate how much the teaching helped you learn."
• "Rate how well the course stimulated you intellectually."  (p. 14)

WOW!  That really raises the bar for instructors to consider and puts the focus where it should be.

What other survey questions could get at actual student learning/ effective teaching versus how engaging an instructor is?  What survey questions have you found most useful on your student evals?

What is "Excellence" in teaching?

To get to excellence in teaching, we have to consider learning - and what is real learning. Bloom's Taxonomy came to mind as I read in the introduction section about the higher levels of learning which occurred for students of the "excellent teachers". The study that was conducted, "looked for signs students developed multiple perspectives and the ability to think about their own thinking" (p. 10). In other words, the best teachers were developing the minds, not filling them.

The concept is seeking to develop "sustained influence" (p. 11) by guiding the students to their own thought processes.  It comes back to the proverb:

Although we recognize the universality of a proverb, how would we translate that in our mind to education and thought?

Give someone a thought and they think it that day;
Teach someone to think and they will come up with new thoughts for a lifetime.

What ideas do you have for how to re-write that proverb for teaching/learning/thinking?
I look forward to your comments/suggestions.